VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, Tirana, Albania, has undergone a profound reshaping of its urban environment. The city’s new reality is built upon images of nonconformist politics and contemporary architecture that frame a cultural project for a European metropolis. This project for the city, is directed by Edi Rama, former Mayor of Tirana and current prime minister for Albania. Popular for his use of the media, Rama’s “new politics” mobilised society into his political project via a system of opposites focused on urban development, transparency, and EU integration: everything the “old politics” of the Communist regime was not. Inevitably, the construction of Tirana’s contemporary identity has created a divide from the city’s urban past to enforce the narrative of its present and future. To examine how architecture is deployed as a political and projective medium in Tirana, this paper places a series of journalistic and architectural images of the city’s two pyramids in sequence. They are: 1. The Empty Pyramid: Skanderbeg Square by 51N4E, Anri Sala and other collaborators. 2. The Monumental Pyramid: Piramida, or, The Pyramid of Tirana, a museum dedicated to the legacy of Communist leader Enver Hoxha, and most recently, an IT centre renovated by MVRDV. Each pyramid is contentious. By positioning their images side by side, the tensions and overlaps that have occurred across their lifetimes piece together an important, and equally relevant, urban narrative that is critical of Rama’s vision for a European capital. Ultimately, this paper asks: What exactly is Tirana’s political project for EU integration? What is culturally at stake? And, what are the urban consequences?