Adaptive Reuse of the Non-Existing

The 2022 demolition of Albania’s Ballsh Oil Refinery erased its physical structure, but not its individuality and social significance. How can architecture engage with sites that exist only in consciousness and subconsciousness ? This project redefines adaptive reuse by treating demolition as a transition into Non-Existing Architectural Systems (NEAS). Through decoding territorial identity, critical events, and abstracted form, the architect acts as a conductor, orchestrating the site’s rebirth into a sustainable Innovation City.

The Ballsh Oil Refinery, a phantom of Albania’s industrial era, becomes the locus of this thesis—not as an old story to remember, but as a living archive to reinterpret. Its demolition is reframed as a transitional act, where industrial carcasses—rusted pipelines, fractured concrete, oil-stained earth—are not discarded, but reanimated as the DNA of an Innovation City. This project, anchored by three intertwined manifestos, redefines architecture as a discipline of exploration and direction, rather than invention. Buildings are not static artifacts, but evolving entities. The project redefines adaptive reuse as an act of upgradation of a structure, that doesn't need to be physical, transcending mere preservation to heal socio-ecological fractures. The architect, no longer author, operates as a conductor—attuning to territory, event, and geometry. Like a composer discerning harmony in cacophony, they cluster fragmented forces into coherence, revealing projects that preexist within reality’s fabric. Design becomes revelation, not invention. The project is not designed but discovered, its form emerging from the world’s inherent logic. This framework fundamentally shifts how we understand the architecture discipline: the built environment is a mirror to the world’s autopoiesis, where form follows existence. Thus, the thesis resolves in its axiomatic core: architecture is not created—it is an echo of reality’s self-creation, where the architect approach order from the chaos inherent to life itself.