Maja Kireta

Summary

Architect and urban planner. In my work and life I combine engineering and humanistic approache. At the beginning of my career, I was involved in designing buildings and cities and managing significant architectural and urban projects, mostly in the private sector. There and then I saw challenges and problems in project preparation, especially communication between all relevant stakeholders and a holistic approach to the project. Through the work of the architects' association, I volunteered to promote the importance of a sustainable and integral approach to the preparation and implementation of construction and spatial planning projects. Based on the conceptual design for the development of a large abandoned barracks in my hometown, which I developed with my team voluntarily in our free time, the City applied for the Urbact action planning network, MAPS, in which I worked as a ULG manager and intensively cooperated with the city administration and the transnational network. The same is repeated in the Urbact transfer project Come in! After that, I increasingly devote myself to strategic planning through European projects (Urbact, Interreg, Bauhaus) and the preparation of significant projects at the national level that are planned through architectural and urban planning competitions. Today, I design less, although it is my original love and the first purpose of my existence as an architect. I prepare projects that are an opportunity of development of my fundamental (professional) beliefs and actions. I run my own firm. Behind me is also the management of the association of architects. I am actively involved in the work of the Croatian chamber of architects and the preparation of national architectural and urban planning policies and legislation. I have participated in a dozen European projects of knowledge and information transfer and writing urban strategies as a key expert, and I have programmed and implemented about twenty complex architectural and urban planning competitions that are the first and most important step in the preparation of a project and the development of buildings and urban spaces. I especially emphasize and implement the importance of modern and innovative preparation projects of public spaces that require the participation of all relevant stakeholders. Therefore, along with transparent transfer of information, I insist on personally implementing participatory workshops, of which I have conducted about twenty so far, based on education at the Urbact summer academy and education in Neuro linguistic programming.