An unusual story of intimacy: Birth and Improvised Architecture in Kosovo during the 1990s

To write this essay, I must begin with my mother. Twenty-eight years have passed since the morning she gave birth to me; at first, she was worried she wouldn’t remember enough to help. But memory is a strange, surprising thing: the more she remembered, the more she remembered!

The first thing she remembers is a small garden. It was early morning. She walked past the well taken care of rose bushes, their scent still heavy in the air. The garden was crowded with people in white or blue uniforms—doctors and nurses taking a break, talking quietly, smoking. Then she entered through a wooden door with glass windows. At the threshold was a woman gripping the doorframe with both hands, her breaths rising and falling in uneven waves. The house was anything but quiet. Voices overlapped, pain echoed through contractions, and nurses hurried between rooms. Then came the sound of newborns: numerous cries drifting from down the corridor, overlapping with one another. My mother remembers thinking: This is not a house anymore.

In the 1990s in Kosovo, this was how birth often began: not in hospitals, but in radically transformed houses. As Albanian citizens were pushed out of the healthcare system, the domestic typology stepped forward. Families offered their houses. Health workers carried their knowledge. The community volunteered. Over nearly a decade, more than a hundred private homes in Prishtina became maternity houses—improvised, yet functional. They formed a peaceful rebellion against political exclusion.

Amid the density of people, my mother remembers something else. Space was scarce. Two women shared a single bed; six or eight shared a room; ten newborns laid together in one bed. Touch became a tool of survival. A hand on a shoulder steadied someone through a contraction. A nurse’s palm pressed against a lower back eased pain. Sensuality emerged without voyeurism; bodies were exposed without shame. The domestic space, usually a site of family privacy, became a place where strangers shared the fragile beginnings of new life.

She admitted she didn’t realize how unusual it was. After years of institutional exclusion, giving birth in a house didn’t feel strange. The parallel system had existed long enough that it became normal. Her focus was on the contractions, not on the fact that she was in a stranger’s house. The unusualness belonged to the architecture; the experience belonged to her.

The architecture of these maternity houses was not designed; it was adapted by necessity. Thresholds became symbolic: the living room gave way to labor, the kitchen to preparation. The house became a system of improvised rooms, each holding a different part of the birth process. The walls absorbed stories. The floors carried footsteps of urgency. The ceilings held the echoes of newborn cries. In response to political collapse, the house became fluid, supportive, and intimate. But this transformation depended on one condition: from the outside, nothing could appear to have changed.

Outside, the neighborhood played its part. The maternity houses were tucked into dense residential areas on the city’s periphery, where they could pass as ordinary homes. From the street, there was little to distinguish them: yellow bricks, a balcony with an antenna, wooden windows with horizontal green plastic blends, a wooden entrance, a pitched roof. Any sign of unusual activity risked attracting the police, who patrolled areas and monitored Albanian gatherings. The neighborhood worked together to keep the system discreet.

Intimacy was intensified through scarcity. How much room a patient “should” have, what privacy meant, whether it could be measured disappeared in the face of necessity. The maternity house became a site where architecture was shaped by collective vulnerability. When public institutions withdrew, access was produced not through proximity to hospitals, but through this intimate reprogramming of domestic space.

Women experienced motherhood together. They lay side by side through the same pain, fear, and relief. They whispered words of encouragement to one another. They shared rooms, beds, and blankets. Birth, usually treated as sacred and private, became communal. Intimacy emerged from co-presence: bodies enduring the same struggle in the same room. It was an intimacy built not on affection but on shared vulnerability.

If you walk past the maternity houses today, you might not notice anything unusual. Many have returned to being homes; others have been destroyed during the war. But once, these rooms held birth, held closeness shaped by necessity, and held a usual story of intimacy. Like a secret between the houses—hidden then and still hidden now.

As I explored the intimacy of this strange time, I realized that intimacy exceeds the physical. In reconstructing the story of how I entered the world—my first contact, my first space—I also grew closer to her. In exploring her intimacy, I discovered my own. In exploring her intimacy, I discovered my own.