Hi, I’m Emma. I just finished my 3rd year of architecture and plan to continue with work and get my master’s.
As an architecture student, I am interested in how the built environment sustains, adapts to, and at times distorts memory; individual and collective. My own projects have a tendency to examine how architecture intersects with narrative, identity, and daily life. My dissertation considered how trauma and political repression locations can be remade through architecture not merely as memorials, but as active producers of cultural recovery and reflection.This project expanded my understanding of spatial narrative, ethical representation, and the affective registers of design. It has also continued to shape my broader practice: using architecture to listen, respond, and give form to silenced histories and voices.
This dissertation explores the Communist era internment camps of Albania from 1944 to 1991 as architectural heritage and collective memory. The dissertation argues that these camps were not passive backgrounds but were instead active instruments of state repression, designed to isolate, dehumanize, and control. Drawing on survivor testimony, archival records, and personal family narrative, the study examines how architecture was used as a means of violence, manifested in spatial confinement, surveillance, and systemic deprivation. It does so by the close analysis of Tepelenë camp, Spaç prison, and Gradishtë camp, and shows how built spaces encapsulate the ideological dictates of Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian government. The dissertation also addresses the erasure of these sites from public memory and attests to their relevance to Albania’s collective memory. By bridging architecture theories, memory, and political violence, the dissertation argues for the preservation of these sites as memorials. It maintains that true reconciliation involves interacting with these forgotten structures and welcoming them not only as vestiges of the past but also as perpetual symbols of resistance, trauma, and identity. Ultimately, the project contributes to an extended understanding of how architecture can, on one hand, be employed for oppression and, on the other, for memory.
BA Architecture is a three-year full-time programme offering exemption from ARB/RIBA Part 1, and the first step towards a career as an architect. The programme interweaves the disciplines of architectural design, histories and theories, technology, and professional practice. The design studio is central to the work students undertake, with year 2 and 3 students taught together in design units. Each unit addresses a different brief and design agenda. This is a rigorous and highly inventive programme, dedicated to architectural ways of designing, thinking and seeing the world. It provides students will skillsets applicable to a wide range of careers.
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