Architecture of Kosovo
Local builders have combined building techniques of conquering empires with the materials at hand and the existing conditions to develop their own varieties of dwellings.
Other historical architectural structures of interest include kullas from the 18th and 19th centuries as well as a number of bridges, urban centers and fortresses.
Rexhep Luci, the urban planner of Pristina who started an initiative to face this problem was killed in September 2000.
On the north side of the city is the cemetery, where many objects have been found: the foundations of a basilica (Paleolithic-Christian) of early Christianity built in the beginning of the 4th century by Emperor Justinian.
With the addition of the use of air photography and satellites in the past years archaeologists, with no costly digging, were able to find and describe lots of big antique buildings which included a public bathroom, the forum (administrative center of the city), a residency of the bishop in the era of the early Christianity, and a baptismal chapel.
[9] Buildings from the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, when Kosovo was under the reign of the Byzantine Empire include castles in Prizren, Veletin and Kasterc and Christian basilicas in Ulpiana, Vërmicë and Harilaq.
Based on the monument, structure, construction way and decorative elements it ranks among the most important buildings of Islamic architecture in Eastern Europe.
[11] A 1959 book by the Municipal National Council of Pristina called "Prishtina" shows the intentions of the regime at the time to lose the city's previous characteristics in the quest to give it more modern traits.
The book boasts about 2200 newly built apartments, a number of health facilities, administrative buildings and schools, 130.000 square meters of new roads and pavements.
[12] Immediately following the Second World War, Yugoslavia's brief association with the Eastern Bloc ushered in a short period of socialist realism.
Centralization within the communist model led to the abolition of private architectural practices and the state control of the profession.
During this period, the governing Communist Party condemned modernism as "bourgeois formalism," a move that caused friction among the nation's pre-war modernist architectural elite.
[13] Socialist realist architecture in Yugoslavia came to an abrupt end with Josip Broz Tito's 1948 split with Stalin.
In the following years the nation turned increasingly to the West, returning to the modernism that had characterized pre-war Yugoslav architecture.
[citation needed] During this era, modernist architecture came to symbolize the nation's break from the USSR (a notion that later diminished with growing acceptability of modernism in the Eastern Bloc).
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Brutalism began to garner a following within Yugoslavia, particularly among younger architects, a trend possibly influenced by the 1959 disbandment of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.
Architects increasingly focused on building with reference to the architectural heritage of their individual socialist republics in the form of critical regionalism.
In the aftermath of the war the church was bombed by unknown attackers and put under the protection of NATO peacekeepers for some years.
Kullas are heavily fortified buildings with small windows and shooting holes, because their main purpose was to offer security in a fighting situation.
The foreign rule of the Ottoman and Serbian empires and the historical influence of former Yugoslavia (communist era) have shaped the architectural landscape of the city to become a conglomerate of cultures.
