Materialising Modernity in Rural Socialist Albania

During the 20th-century, also Socialist Albania planned, adopted, and implemented large scale development and agricultural plans to modernize its rural areas. Those plans provided an experimental opportunity for new landscape and architectural ideas converging on the vision imposed by the regime. With the establishment of dedicated central-state institutions, aimed at designing and implementing the modern rural architecture and urban planning, Socialist Albania attempted at the urbanization of the countryside. A process that, while affirming an evolutionary continuity with the ‘rational essence of tradition’, tried to integrate it into the necessary development of the new socialist rurality. This article aims at investigating how the communist ideology materialized modernity in the Albanian rural architectural and territorial planning. To what extent traditional local architectural values have been reflected in the standardization of the modern rural housing, for a classless society, characteristic of the Socialist planning during the land collectivization process? Despite the socialist ideals inspired by scientific, technological, and cultural progress pushed towards a new urbanized rurality, de facto, the tension between tradition, nationalism and socialism shaped a new hybrid and modest rural architecture that sought to temper the characteristics of local genius loci in the universal qualities of socialist modernism. As part of the EU funded project “Materializing Modernity – Socialist and Post-socialist Rural Legacy in Contemporary Albania”, this contribution intends to provide a preliminary state of the art as baseline upon which develop further studies to discuss the Albanian example in the framework of European studies on modernist rural architecture and landscape.