The development of socialist housing after WWII supplied Eastern Europe with a stubborn yet prolific architectural typology. Today, countries across Europe have accumulated a residue stock of 50–100 million structurally sound but thermally failing prefabricated panel housing (LPS), a reminder of communism’s impositions of uniformity in space, behavior, and identity. With the fall of communism, Albanian residents have resisted this messaging with shtesa: informal, handmade, defiant extensions built without architects, reflecting a larger trend of personally driven retrofitting to accommodate shifting personal demands for program and space. My project assists the shtesa ideology as a “kit of parts” architectural strategy for large-scale, deployed retrofitting for the existing stock in Albania and beyond. Specifically, I propose that by deploying a systematized, prefabricated external insulation system that uses biochar-loaded EPS panels that sequester carbon while reducing embodied emissions, the retrofit becomes a new kind of shtesa.
