In his master’s thesis, Lindon Bytyqi examined the Youth Palace in Prishtina, Kosovo. The monumental structure was built during the Yugoslav socialist era and is currently in a state of spatial and symbolic uncertainty. Lindon Bytyqi has designed various interventions that demonstrate how this significant building – representative of other buildings from this period in Kosovo – could be dealt with.

Lindon Bytyqi describes his work as follows: Once a central site for collective gathering and cultural production, the building has gradually been neglected, fragmented, and partially privatized, reflecting broader patterns of institutional silence and unresolved memory across post-socialist cities.
Rather than proposing preservation or erasure, the project embraces the building’s incompleteness as both method and message. Through a series of targeted architectural gestures such as removing the glazed façade to open the structure toward the Grand Hotel, Arbëria, and Rilindja the intervention transforms the Palace into a contemporary urban agora: open, porous, and continuously reinterpretable. A bridge replaces separation, and circulation becomes civic infrastructure.
Rooted in the lived memory of a city where “meet me at Boro Ramiz” still echoes in conversation, the thesis positions the Youth Palace not as an isolated case, but as part of a broader typology of socialist-era buildings burdened by ambiguity. It challenges architecture’s tendency to romanticize decay or retreat into neutrality, and instead proposes a design practice grounded in reactivation, subtraction, and public responsibility.
By refusing closure, the project reframes incompleteness as a tool of resilience redefining architecture not as a static solution, but as an evolving platform for memory, encounter, and transformation.

Plans

Visualisations

Models

Final critics

Thesis book

The complete thesis book can be downloaded here.

Module: Master thesis SS25 Lecturers: Peter Althaus, Felix Wettstein, Marcel Bächtiger Assistant: Qendrim Gashi