Across

The name Gada comes from the Georgian preverb გადა-, which expresses movement across or beyond: to cross, to pass over, to move from one place or condition to another, and to carry something across. As a preverb, გადა- cannot exist independently. It becomes meaningful through the verb it joins, describing an action in transition.

This offers a way of thinking about practice.

Gada is interested in what happens across conditions: between building and landscape, past and present, memory and imagination, preservation and change, research and design. It works across disciplines, scales and temporalities, not simply to combine them, but to examine what is transformed when one condition encounters another.

A landscape becomes heritage.

A building acquires a new meaning.

A political transition reshapes a place.

A memory is carried into a new generation.

An inherited environment is reinterpreted for the present.

These moments of transition are where Gada’s work begins.

The practice is particularly concerned with the cultural and political forces that shape the built environment, with a focus on modernist heritage and its afterlives. Buildings and landscapes are understood not as fixed objects, but as places in which histories accumulate, meanings shift, and different forms of memory coexist. Their transformation is therefore not simply a question of preservation or replacement, but of how something inherited can be carried forward without remaining fixed in the past.

To move across is also to carry something with you.

This is central to Gada’s understanding of heritage. The past is not treated as a condition to be reproduced intact, nor as an obstacle to future development. It is material that can be transferred into another context, translated, reinterpreted and given another life.

For Gada, research and design are not separate activities. Research is a way of reading a place; design is a way of entering into its transformation. The practice works with what already exists, its histories, material traces, memories, conflicts and latent possibilities, to develop new forms of inhabitation and care.

Its projects take the form of buildings, landscapes, spatial interventions, research, writing, and exhibitions. What connects them is not a single scale or discipline, but a shared interest in transition.

Gada therefore works across:

SPACE

between territory, landscape, architecture and ground

TIME

between what a place was, what it is, and what it may become

POLITICS

between changing regimes, narratives and forms of collective memory

MATERIAL

between what is inherited and what can be transformed

KNOWLEDGE

between research, interpretation and design

Gada is interested in moving across while simultaneously carrying something along: the moment when an existing condition enters another life, when something inherited is transformed without being erased, and when a place acquires a new meaning without losing the traces of what came before.

Anna Kintsurashvili is a Tbilisi-born, Rotterdam-based architect and researcher working across architecture, landscape and cultural production. She approaches buildings and landscapes as evolving conditions, examining how political and social transitions, intertwined with public memory, reshape their meanings.

Her work has focused on Soviet-era housing and its afterlives in Georgia and Lithuania, and on the postcolonial re-reading of modernist heritage in Uganda, the subject of her thesis, “Traversing Modernist Memory”, which proposed a preservation plan for the Uganda National Cultural Centre and Theatre. She holds a multidisciplinary MSc in architecture with distinction from Aalto University and is a registered architect in the Netherlands.

Prior to founding Gada, Anna worked as an architect in architecture and landscape offices in Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, with a focus on revitalisation work that carried her research interests into design.