Sometimes, symbols are simple. A vainglorious monument is built to commemorate a dictator, an opulent extravagance in a country where bread is rationed, whose people can barely eat. The regime is then overthrown, and after considerable struggles democracy is established. Citizens feel free to appropriate and, none too respectfully, adapt his legacy, until at last an architect is appointed to give permanent form to this popular takeover. Menace becomes playfulness, the closed becomes open, the grandiose informal, the grey polychrome.
This is the story of the Pyramid of Tirana, a 21 metre-high (70ft) concrete cone in Albania’s capital that opened in 1988 as a museum of the life of former leader Enver Hoxha, who for four decades until his death in 1985 ran a reclusive communist state in which typewriters and colour televisions were banned. The monument was his equivalent of Vladimir Lenin’s tomb in Moscow’s Red Square, only with a 22-tonne statue of Hoxha rather than an embalmed corpse. The building’s design, by a team of architects that included his daughter and son-in-law, was both sci-fi and pharaonic, with soaring struts rising to a central oculus.
Over time, the pyramid was taken over by multiple uses, including a radio station, a nightclub, conference centre and a base for Nato during the 1998-99 war in neighbouring Kosovo. The people of Tirana took up the risky sport of climbing to its summit and sliding down its slopes, and some looted its marble tiles for use on their own building projects. Homeless people and drug users sheltered there. Although demolition was considered of the increasingly dilapidated structure, and there was also a plan to build a national theatre there, most Albanians wanted to keep it.
Eventually, the municipality decided to make it into an IT centre for the young, a “nurturing environment for young Albanians”, whose €12m construction cost would be funded by the Albanian-American Development Foundation. The new uses are housed in an assortment of 34 multicoloured boxes scattered in, on and around the old structure like a careless child’s building blocks, designed by the Dutch architectural practice MVRDV. Flights of steps run up the roof’s exterior, with one section still kept for sliding, so that people can clamber up more safely than before. The new work, says one of MVRDV’s founding partners, Winy Maas, “overcomes” the pyramid. It is a squat made permanent; managed anarchy.
The boxes contain such things as classrooms and workshops, also cafes, startup spaces, a room on Airbnb and an outpost of the French embassy. About half are for the use of Tumo, a nonprofit educational institution that provides free after-school education to teenagers in new technologies. Two are tilted, to make small lecture theatres on the inside, with bleacher seating on the roof. The public can wander between and over the boxes, walk on their roofs, sit on their terraces. They are piled up inside the pyramid, dotted about its roof, and spread about a surrounding open space, which has loose and naturalistic planting by the Tirana-based architects iRI. You could call the composition both village-like – making informal spaces between the boxes and with the adjoining urban fabric – and, with its platforms and balconies attending unspecified future events, theatrical.
The interior of the pyramid is free to enter and ascend, which makes the whole ensemble, inside and out, into an open, park-like experience. Presiding over it all is the hacked and scarred body of the Hoxha folly, with its sawn-off beams, cracked marble and cranky communist-brutalist details exposed to view. But the new work – through selective repair and the introduction of additional daylight, plus those coloured boxes – successfully extracts its malevolence, and reveals some latent nobility and drama.
The project is the latest in a series of efforts to change the meaning and the experience of Tirana’s communist legacy, the country’s version of a more widespread question, which is how to deal with the relics of tyranny. In Berlin, for example, some communist and Nazi icons were demolished, while others were kept in the name of history, and war damage meticulously preserved in the restoration of the Reichstag and the Neues Museum. In Tirana, after the artist Edi Rama became mayor in 2000, they set about painting its grim apartment blocks in bright colours, a cheap but effective way of cheering people up and signifying that the place was changing.
Rama is now prime minister of Albania, and the makeover of the city continues with his support and that of the current mayor, Erion Veliaj. The city’s central public place, the once arid Skanderbeg Square, has been enriched with a shaggy biodiverse mini forest. A bunch of towers is rising around the centre, designed by some of the more ostentatious contemporary European architects. The tallest of them is Downtown One, also designed by MVRDV, a block of flats and offices sited close to the pyramid. Here, cubic projections and recessions in its glass flanks pick out a pixelated map of Albania – a literal representation, says Maas, of an “emerging country”.
It’s a dare-to-be-crass moment that is something of an MVRDV trademark. Their other works include the Rotterdam Markthal, where the daily transactions of market stalls take place in a huge tube decorated with giant images of plants and insects, like a 3D supergraphic version of a Dutch still life. They designed the Balancing Barn in Suffolk, a rentable holiday home in the form of a silver extruded house that hovers at one end above its sloping site. They were the architects of the Marble Arch Mound, the catastrophic 2021 attempt to build a temporary tree-covered hill at the end of Oxford Street.
The pyramid, too, is none too subtle. Its construction is rough at the edges. Access for people in wheelchairs is scandalously awful, to a degree that undermines the project’s claims to be accessible and diverse, the inherent difficulties of the old structure’s many levels being unnecessarily compounded by multiple new flights of steps. You could also say that there is an element of PR or propaganda to all the bright imagery of tech capitalism in a country that is still poor.
But, as a way of remaking a troubled past without obliterating it, it’s powerful. The new work honours the complexity of the building’s history, which includes the labour and skill of the people who built it and the adaptive genius of the later occupations. It discovers pride in the past alongside hope in the future. It is fun and joyful. You can believe that the citizens of Tirana will take it to their heart, while people outside Albania will get the message that this is a country both with aspirations and its own irreverent way with public works. MVRDV now have two symbolic tumuli on their CV, in the cities of Westminster and Tirana. Same architect, different clients, which suggests how important the latter are to the success of a project.
