I decided to address an issue outside the “administrative” borders, I want to talk about “the decision to demolish” the so-called “Pyramid of Tirana,” and I want to do that for two reasons. One, to ignore the many architectural and urban problems in Kosovo (this as sign of a protest towards the ignoring a Kosovar architect gets). And two, I am categorically against the demolition of a national asset.
This work, which may be cited as the most important work in Albanian architecture, was designed by a wide group of experts in architecture, engineering and urban planning in Albania. A group that was led by the former dictator’s daughter Pranvera Hoxha and brother-in-law Klement Kolaneci, both architects. I say it is an important work also for the fact that it was not designed by Austrian, Italian, Russian, Chinese, or any other national that may have been deployed in “our land” up to that year, projecting the most important buildings in Albania. It was our engineers who relied on a genuine school of Albanian architecture, tearing down the usual vertical walls with window openings stacked on top of each other in a massive inclined area with a constructive fall, which I believe were calculated for the first time in Albania.
Unveiled in the fall of ‘88, and closed down in the late 90’s, without any doubt we can give it the award of the museum with the shortest lifespan in the world? Designed to be the “uncle’s” museum (Hoxha was often called xhaxhi – uncle), its function changed many times during these years. It was used for a library, a youth and cultural center, internet cafe, various fairs, concerts, and in the end as a club. Did I forget anything? Ahh yes, for a couple of years now the largest Albanian television uses it as their home.
This object, which has long been transformed into one of the most symbolic and characteristic places of Tirana, is now threatened with collapse, threatened to be replaced by “yet another” parliament (complex). It is threatened with “a death sentence”!
A victim of urban violence, a victim of a political ideology, supposedly to “forget” the past, forgetting in this way its core values and its beauty. With a form that differs completely from any other object in Albania, because it has a unique volume, with clean lines, unique materialization, harmonized beautifully with the green space around it that creates an active urban space, in one word, it is an object “with architecture”!
History cannot be deleted, because you learn from it! Therefore I propose its reconstruction, its re-functioning, I propose a Pyramid 2.0!
[This post originally appeared on Kosovo 2.0. Photo courtesy Domusweb]
