Tirana is the European capital that has changed most over the past 15 years. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1990, the city experienced the following sequence of episodes: the advent of democracy, mass immigration, a dramatic and grotesque economic recession followed by unrest and foreign military intervention, rapid and disproportionate economic growth, a fanciful and pragmatic urban policy at the hands of its postmodern prince and, lastly, a surreal stalemate period during which the city awaits the outcome of an extenuating duel between the mayor and the prime minister. Domus visited Tirana at this crucial moment in its development.
Texts by Pier Paolo Tamburelli. Photography by Valentina Gugole. Edited by Elena Sommariva, Pier Paolo Tamburelli.

Project Tirana

1. Welcome to the city!
Cleverly placed in the international artistic landscape, Tirana is a paradoxically postmodern city, where the superstructure seems tempted to go it alone and ignore a wretched structure. So, while an entire cartoon-like virtual city produced by foreign architects floats above a real one awaiting to materialise, the first thing those arriving in the capital encounter is a crater full of puddles. Cars must try to circumnavigate a concrete plinth that was to support a new road junction, approved by city hall in July 2004 but halted on the orders of the governmental building police a year later. The Zogu i Zi roundabout is currently perhaps the most emblematic spot in Tirana. An involuntary monument to the institutional conflict that has placed Mayor Edi Rama at odds with Prime Minister Sali Berisha, it is the point where the city’s ambitions diverge most visibly from its reality. But it is also the place that most clearly indicates its growth priorities: the drawing up of a city plan, infrastructural modernisation, and the definition of more stable bureaucratic procedures.

2. Staggering population explosion
Between 1989 and 2005, the population of Tirana increased from 230,000 to nearly a million. In the 1990s the city expanded onto the surrounding farmland with the addition of unplanned housing hastily constructed on plots of uncertain ownership. The last five years has seen an intense period of speculation: eight-storey blocks with reinforced-concrete structures, with two underground parking levels, shops on the ground floor, offices on the first floor and then apartments. Between 2001 and 2004, this activity produced an average of 2,700 new apartments per year. The construction sector became the driving force in the local economy and created the conditions and resources that have enabled the local administration to formulate a new urban-growth strategy.

3. Minute-scale socialist construction
In Tirana, the Socialist building monotony is manifested on a Lilliputian scale: buildings are no higher than four storeys and distances between the blocks do not exceed 20 metres. The spaces between the social-building hovels are turned into small squares and the alienating urban systems were warped from the beginning by brilliantly clumsy planning. As a result, trees of a certain age are always taller than the buildings in Tirana, lending the city a familiar and rural air that is quite remarkable for one of the most polluted spots in Europe.

4-5. Domestic metropolis
Tirana is a city on a remarkably minute scale. Not even recent building speculation has changed this. The city’s density may change but not the sizes of the open spaces, which remain surprisingly welcoming and homely. It would be fairly easy for a well-intentioned planner to jeopardise the city’s greatest spatial resource in an attempt to reform the road network. It would, on the other hand, be practical (and perhaps possible) to imagine that the city can increase its density without sacrificing the intricate weave of spaces by providing it with an underground transport system. Shops normally occupy the first two floors of every building. As the buildings rarely have more than eight storeys above ground, clearly at least a quarter of the built space is open to the public. This abundance of commercial space has turned a city with no libraries, swimming pools, cinemas or theatres into a very public place.

6. Albanian vendetta
From the fall of the Communist regime until 2001, the banks of the Lana River were overrun with all sorts of buildings: housing, tiny business enterprises, kiosks and bars. Almost as if to conform to the total cancellation of public space in the new capitalist city, these buildings, indifferent to both the rules of urban planning and of ownership, occupied every available square metre of green space in the city centre. This ungainly whole was perhaps the most emblematic indication of the raging Albanian approach to the market economy, and as the symbol of unbalanced and mostly illegal expansion it became the first target of the project to restore legality following the 1997 recession. So, since 2001, the bulldozers of the restored governmental and municipal authorities have been demolishing the buildings crowded along the Lana River. Today, all that remains is the house where Ramadan Emrullaj lives with his wife, the two widows of his sons, his daughter and his grandchildren: 12 people in all. The Emrullaj family house was built in 1997 and has three floors; the ground floor is uninhabited. The east facade is painted garnet red and its windows are closed. The Emrullaj family is involved in a complex story of blood feuds and has refused to leave the house, even in the face of the bulldozers. Tradition forbids the killing of people inside their homes and the males of the Emrullaj family are only safe inside the house.

7. Architecture “trade fair”
The structure of Tirana is still that designed by Italian architects during the protectorate and viceroyalty. The line traced by Brasini remains the monumental core of the city as well as its only main thoroughfare. Along this axis lie the amazing monuments of the last century of Albanian history. As if in a provincial celebration of totalitarian rhetoric, stiff Fascist buildings alternate with equally rigid Communist constructions, striking a remarkable and alienating brotherhood. The buildings all seem to come from elsewhere, almost stage scenery lined up to illustrate everything that Tirana is not but, for a brief moment, wanted to be. The thoroughfare reveals its silvery beauty by night, with no traffic and with the violent and alienating artificial lighting: the yellow city hall and the blue Palace of Culture.

8. A monument to culture
The pyramid was designed as the Enver Hoxha Museum in 1987 by a collective led by Klement Kolaneci and contained a library and offices as well as the exhibition spaces and stores. Now, despite its obviously incompatible type, it is sporadically used as an exhibition building. It also contains a bar, a discotheque and the offices of a local TV station, the transmitters of which are installed on the top. The pyramid does not lack a certain awkward beauty. The building follows a bizarre geometric theory (a spiral inscribed within a star) that has produced a somewhat intricate type and permits a paradoxical host of metaphors on the architectural object. The pyramid’s unbridled stylistic freedom seems to contrast with the strict ideological framework that produced it – its futuristic aims painting a naive and kind picture of the technologically backward society that created it.

9. Central power vs local power
by Ilir Mati
Between the fall of the Communist regime and approval of the law for the return of publicly appropriated lands to their former owners, plots could be purchased directly from the State. The State even continued to hand out building permits after 1993, when the law was ratified. This ambiguous situation saw the creation of paradoxes, such as that leading to the formation of a huge crater right in the city centre, behind the Palace of Culture. A Swiss speculator of Kosovan origin purchased the area behind the Palace of Culture from the State and obtained permission to build a hotel on it. Later, numerous former owners started legal actions. However, aided by politicians and an unreliable legal system, the entrepreneur tried to secure the right to continue building by hastily commencing works (under Albanian law, permits obtained remain valid for constructions built at least to the foundation stage, even if on land owned by others). Ten years have now passed and the ditch is still there, surrounded by total indifference and used only by prostitutes plying their trade in full daylight. The prime minister recently ordered that the ditch be transformed but the government has produced no official document and the mayor disputes the prime minister’s instructions. Diggers and lorries protected by the building police discharge material to fill the ditch and the municipal police fine the lorry drivers.

10-11. Underground fortress
by Ilir Mati
When talk of “Star Wars” emerged around the early 1980s, the leaders of the land of eagles decided to use Chinese money and the abundant local manpower to construct absurd anti-atomic defences. The Party propaganda expressed the concept with macabre force: “We shall not die like rabbits in the Star Wars. We are children of the eagles and we shall overcome!”. The mountains were drilled to create tunnels that would house all sorts of things: aeroplanes, tanks, submarines and ammunition, but also factories, hospitals, army barracks, ministries and the seat of the central party committee. The population participated in this initiative en masse with every citizen working 21 days per year to help build the anti-atomic defences. It was real forced labour. They worked without the necessary protection and with rudimentary technology. After 1990, the bunkers and the tunnels seem to have been forgotten, relics of what immediately became an incomprehensible past. However, these defences still affect a large portion of the territory and have slowly been taken over. This is what has happened to 12 tunnels in Shkosa, northeast of Tirana, built to house the nearby tractor factory (in reality a tank-building plant) that used to employ 4,000 workers and is now totally abandoned. The factory was slowly demolished by the “iron prospectors” who removed the rods from the reinforced concrete to sell them. One kilogram of this type of iron is worth approximately 0.02 euro. The tunnels, running parallel to each other and linked by a narrow transversal passage, are more than a hundred metres long, just under ten wide and the same high. Some are used as depots for old buses, lorries and industrial machinery. The writing on the very old vehicles is in Cyrillic, on the old ones it is Chinese and on the more recent ones Italian.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli studied architecture at the University of Genoa and at the Berlage Institute. He has been a part of baukuh since 2004 (https://www.baukuh.it)