RESEARCH BY DESIGN: EXPLORING RESILIENCE Test Site: Osumi Island in Berat, Albania

OSUMI PANORAMAS

Our aim is to instigate a zone of negotiation; the Osumi Island must become the fulcrum where nature and urbanity unite. What happens on the island has to primarily generate confluence – one that becomes cultural and enduring. Rather than a strict re-naturalisation plan, or it's opposite, a conquer of space for the city, we propose a hinge: a multilayered process where people and nature can not only coexist but cooperate. We plan a device which can resolve many of the existing challenges while offering various possibilities of experience. Various new perspectives are composed – of the Osumi natural ecosystems, of the city, castle and its surroundings, mirroring those which the city is so plentiful of in a series of new Osumi Panoramas.

From the river embankment three walkways project over a canal-pool and give access to a path on the top of a stepped earth bank, before continuing towards the island and our three proposed structures. Each suggest a distinct way of experiencing nature and offer a separate degree of protection to a recovered environment. Every typology enacts the idea of the panorama in various ways, providing each a particular form of perception: the Greenhouse contains, the Colonnade protects and the Market discloses. This narrative of panning, scanning and focusing on particular ecologies is complemented with spaces for programme and public activities. The Greenhouse, the Colonnade and the Market are to become landmarks of cultural and social significance. Osumi Panoramas aims to create cultural significance with moderate means: setting a simple infrastructure where both natural and urban environments may coincide in a graceful yet convincing manner.



KWY is a multidisciplinary platform investigating the nature of collaboration within the context of specific projects. Drawing from its background as a research oriented design practice, where each singular project opens an opportunity for a collaborative process, KWY partnered with YellowOffice, an award winning landscape and urbanism design studio. Its practice brings together several scales of landscape design processes ranging from urban planning to private parks, from fragments of urban centres to territorial areas as well as the re-naturalization of neglected zones.

For the Osumi Island Competition KWY and YellowOffice collaborate with the artist Jan Bünnig, who has a conceptual focus on the complexity of our relationship with nature and whose work is materially and formally related to fluvial processes, and with the architect Elian Stefa, who has dealt extensively with the significance of architecture and urbanism in Albania through research projects and architectural critique. Studio PS96 is the local supporting architecture and engineering practice.