Now his face will loom over the capital like never before. Construction has begun on an 85-meter high apartment, office and shop complex in the center of Tirana, designed in the shape of Skanderbeg’s head. Images of the project depict a shapeless white ringed tower with balconies that undulate in and out to form an anomalous approximation of the hero’s features, imprinting his profile permanently on the horizon in concrete and glass. Wealthy future residents will be able to peer out of the warrior’s eyes, hang from his ears, or dine alfresco at the tip of his nose – from where the green will hang in an unfortunate trickle like snot. Is nationalism good or bad? Albania needs it to show that Winy Maas is sexy and cool The surreal vision is the work of Dutch architects MVRDV, who don’t know how to construct buildings in the shape of oversized modernist objects – or ‘figurative sculptural works’, as they prefer to call them. Their disastrous Marble Arch Mound in London, which arguably cost the Tory council its leadership in the local community, was just the latest in a long line of cartoonish creations that appear to have been plucked from the depths of a joke shop. The architects have designed a museum in the form of giant comic speech bubbles, an art warehouse in the shape of an Ikea salad bowl and an apartment complex that spells out the word HOME in the form of blocks. But they seem to have saved their more common metaphors for the Balkans, perhaps assuming that fewer of their customers and critics will ever see the buildings in person. MVRDV’s vision for Downtown One, a 140m tower whose cantilevered houses and offices form a pixelated ‘map’ of Albania. Photo: © MVRDV A short distance from where Skanderbeg’s giant head is planned to rise, there is already another tower designed by MVRDV, called Downtown One. Completed last year, the 140m concrete frame makes it the tallest building in the city and continues the pop-nationalist theme. Instead of a face, this heavy slab of luxury apartments and offices features a pixelated map of Albania protruding from its facade – though the form is so indistinct, it looks more like concrete formwork that slipped on the way up, leaving a messy chaos. traces. The dramatically sculpted volumes imagined by MVRDV appear to have been designed with value in shallower dimples, giving the impression that the building is eroding prematurely. “These days, cities all over the world look more and more alike,” says Winy Maas, founding partner of the Dutch architecture firm. “I always encourage them to resist that, find their individuality and highlight it. Tirana has the opportunity of a blank canvas for high-density construction. It can be progressive in that sense and create character and sense of place.” But many local residents aren’t so sure about the sense of place created by Maas and the roster of other international architects who have flown in to reshape the city. A handful of towers are rising around Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square, with four already completed and at least six more under construction. There have been strong protests against the destruction of Ottoman-era mansions to make way for apartment buildings, with critics lamenting the loss of cultural heritage and skyrocketing property prices and accusations that the projects are being used as money laundering schemes. organized crime. Planned value… Downtown One under construction, with its relief map dramatically reduced. Photo: Idit Riza/© MVRDV Two historic villas were demolished to make way for the Skanderbeg Tower in May 2020, when the city was in a pandemic lockdown. At the same time, the city’s beloved National Theatre, which dates back to the 1930s, was also bulldozed to make way for a widely condemned project by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. “The future of Tirana will be full of ghost skyscrapers,” says Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, a Dutch writer who has lived in Tirana for the past 12 years and closely follows the city’s development. “I love MVRDV – the stuff they build in the Netherlands is one of my favorite buildings – but then they come to Albania and become miserable bastards. They think they can get away with the wretched plan by running all the stupid nationalist tropes you can think of.’ In a 2018 lecture, when the two towers were under development, Maas referred to the obvious nationalistic symbolism of designing a building in the shape of the country’s map. “I had a discussion with some of the European politicians about this,” he said. “Because, can you do that? Is nationalism good or bad? But Albania needs it, to show that it’s sexy and that it’s really cool.” The original vision for the Toptani shopping center… Photo: © MVRDV Pacing back and forth on stage, speaking like a hyperactive child who had consumed too many E numbers, Maas rhapsodized about his love for Albania. He described it as “a country with no money, who only drinks coffee and has nothing to do” – the perfect blank slate for his outlandish ideas, “like a mini China” with plenty of opportunities for architects. “Developers are getting richer,” he enthused, but made no mention of where the money might come from to build such heady visions, given the country’s poor economy. A 2020 report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime noted that the Albanian construction industry had become a popular focal point for international criminal gangs to launder money, mainly from drug trafficking. It was estimated that €1.6 billion worth of “dirty money” had been laundered through the Albanian real estate sector in the previous three years, with 60% of project funding coming from illegal sources. The Office of the General Directorate for the Prevention of Money Laundering in Albania said it had noticed “significant investments in real estate with an unknown source of funds”, which it described as “suspicious”. … and the dramatically weakened reality of the mall as it is. Photo: Peter Forsberg/Shopping/Alamy Last year, anti-mafia prosecutors in Italy found that the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate had identified Tirana’s new apartment blocks as a prime opportunity to launder their cash. In a wiretap, two of those arrested were heard discussing a building developer in Albania who had three building permits for buildings worth 180 million euros but only had 10 million euros on hand. “The new skyscrapers will be sold for 3,000-4,000 euros per square meter,” says one of the suspects. “And do you know how much it cost to build? €510.” MVRDV says that, in accordance with Dutch law, it conducts background checks on its customers using a third-party company that scans for criminal activity, among other things, and there is no suggestion of illicit funds. A spokesperson for the city of Tirana said: “The task of the municipality is to ensure that construction plans, aesthetics, architectural rules and mobility plans are respected. We understand that we live in a toxic political environment in the Balkans and have repeatedly asked the opposition leaders to point out: which of these towers is suspected of such [criminal] activity? To this day, we have no answer and there has been no official claim with the prosecutor’s office in Tirana.” The radical transformation of the Albanian capital over the past two decades can be primarily credited to Edi Rama, who served as its mayor from 2000-2011 and was the country’s prime minister from 2013. Rama was a professional basketball player and artist in the 1990s, and Maas says in his lecture: “I know Eddie from Paris, when he was a painter.” Rama returned to Albania to become culture minister in 1998 and launched a sweeping clean-up operation when he became mayor. He made headlines for his policies of painting gray Soviet buildings in bright colors to enliven the city, planting trees, creating bike lanes and organizing international architectural competitions – reforms that earned him the inaugural World Mayor award in 2004. One of the first projects MVRDV received under Rama’s reign was the Toptani mall in 2005, which was designed as a sunken pixelated mass covered in giant LCD advertising screens. Having won the competition, Maas heard nothing until a few years later, when he realized that the building had actually been built by other architects, and had been drastically weakened in the process. The digital facade was swapped for standard gray cladding panels, while his vision of an open arcade became a general enclosed mall. Unrealized project… MVRDV’s proposal for Tirana Rocks, an apartment complex by Tirana’s lake. Photo: © MVRDV “Projects here are often carried out in a completely different way than the way the architects originally intended,” says Van Gerven Oei. “There is the reality of digital performance, always beautiful and shiny and innovative, and then there is the reality of Albanian construction companies, who want to do the easiest, fastest thing at the lowest possible price.” Not to be deterred by the Frankenstein mall, MVRDV continued to look for work in Albania. Several unrealized projects followed, from a colossal pile of elongated apartment buildings designed for a lakeside site in 2008, called Tirana Rocks, to a coastal resort for a Russian client designed as an artificial slope that would glow eerily at night – ‘better from any James Bond…
