Share Omnia Award speech in Prishtina 2025

Thank you very much to all of you for this prize.To be honest, I feel a little too young for an Opera Omnia award, because I believe my best works are the ones I am doing now. In fact, I have more projects underway than ever before. This year we expect to complete a small museum in Prishtina, transform a 1980s bus station into a modern transportation hub in Prizren, and begin the first phase of a very large housing development of more than 150,000 square meters. We are also finishing a few private houses and starting two new ones.Still, I prefer to remain small. I see myself as an author-architect, and I enjoy designing everything personally.When I left Kosovo thirty-seven years ago, I was not even sure that I wanted to become an architect. At that time I was more interested in the fine arts. Even after my second graduation in Geneva, architecture remained mysterious to me. I was not sure I truly understood what architecture was—at least what it meant to me.Then I discovered the writings of Louis Kahn. After that I went to see his buildings. Later I followed the path of Le Corbusier, then Wright, Mies, and many others. This opened the door to traveling and to thinking seriously about architecture.During those years I understood a few fundamental things that somehow awakened me. I realized that architecture is a major art. Nothing is larger than architecture.I grew up in Prizren, in the shadow of old mosques. I loved the spaces under the sixteenth-century domes and the nineteenth-century houses of the Nënkalaja neighborhood. They were extraordinary compositions of space—so refined that it was hard to believe they had been built by vernacular craftsmen, often without drawings.Many questions remained unanswered for me at that time.One of those questions—crucial for understanding architecture—was illuminated by a small text by Italo Calvino, called The Mihrab. Calvino writes about a journey to Isfahan, where he realized:“The most important thing in the world is empty space.”He describes the mihrab—the niche in a mosque that indicates the direction of prayer:“Void, nothingness, absence, silence—all these words are burdened with meanings too heavy for something that does not wish to be any of them. It cannot be defined by words. The only symbol that represents it is the mihrab… that something which reveals itself precisely by not being there.”For me, the void became the key to understanding architecture.In many ancient cultures, the void was more important than the solid. Even Greek temples, for example, often have an even number of columns so that the center remains open.Of course we need materials—walls, planes, structures—to define space. But these elements exist primarily to frame the void.The void, in a sense, is the mirror of meaning. You cannot separate space from meaning. Architecture without meaning is useless.Architecture can be many things at the same time. But the one thing that can only be architecture is the feeling of space—the experience of beauty within space.And beauty, in the end, is simply the manifestation of love.Thank you.