Starchitects, Protests, and a Concrete Head: Inside Albania's Building Boom

Forty-eight of the 50 international architecture competitions Albania has held in recent decades were won by foreign architects. Only two went to Albanian firms working alone. The figure comes from Adelina Greca, head of the National Territorial Planning Agency, and it explains a lot about what's burning in Tirana right now.

Prime Minister Edi Rama, 62, has spent 13 years in office — and 26 since he first became mayor of Tirana — remaking the country with imported design talent. "Architecture," he said, choosing his words carefully, "has the power to change societies. It's like a strong medicine. It can heal, or it can kill."

The patient is currently throwing paving stones.

Why are protesters targeting buildings?

A Vanity Fair-style architecture pilgrimage arrived in October to find civil unrest. Protesters demanding Rama's resignation had shattered storefronts on the Boulevard of Martyrs of the Nation, using hundreds of lifted paving stones. Clashes that authorities say left hundreds injured; police answered with tear gas and rubber bullets. An information kiosk on Skanderbeg Square was set on fire. The Tirana Pyramid — Enver Hoxha's memorial, recycled into a public amenity by Rotterdam's MVRDV — was damaged too.

The trigger was partly architectural. Rama agreed in late May to support luxury resorts by a company associated with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Days later, his second annual gathering of foreign architects ran June 3–5 — and drew demonstrators carrying signs reading "Starchitects go home!" That demand fused with environmental and anti-Trump sentiment into what locals call the Flamingo Revolution.

Bjarke Ingels and 2016 Pritzker winner Alejandro Aravena "pay to come here and talk and they love it," Rama said. The affection is not universally shared.

What has actually been built?

Plenty, and it's loud. Tirana, a city of about 600,000 in a country of 2.3 million, now hosts:

• Stefano Boeri's tree-laden "vertical forest" skyscraper;
• a bright red Marriott by Italian architect Marco Casamonti;
• the Plaza Hotel by Johan Anrys of Belgian firm 51N4E, an ellipse at its base morphing into a rectangle at its crown;
• an MVRDV condo shaped like a head, with a pronounced nose the architects identify as Skanderbeg, the 15th-century hero. Some Albanians think it's Rama. Both readings are "urban legends," the prime minister said. "It's the form of a man through history." Then, nodding at his interviewer: "It also looks like you."

Anneke Abhelakh's new book The Albanian Files lists more than 500 projects by 60 foreign firms. About one-tenth have been realized. That ratio echoes Ordos, Inner Mongolia, in 2008, where 100 foreign architects designed 100 villas for millionaires who never materialized. The giddy optimism, the uncertainty — déjà vu, nearly 20 years on.

Is the resentment justified?

Rama's on-record verdict: the only Albanian architects who object are "the mediocre ones." The rest, he argues, benefit from Herzog & de Meuron, OMA and Diller Scofidio + Renfro raising everyone's game, just as Chinese architects got "a free education from the western masters" two decades ago. Foreign winners must partner with locally licensed architects.

Anrys, who arrived 22 years ago as one of the first foreigners, runs a Tirana studio with 20 Albanian architects. "The foreign architects have brought Albanian architects more work than we've taken," he said, while acknowledging the local question: "Are we not good enough?"

Greca, who has worked for Rama almost continuously since 2003, put it more ambitiously: "There will come a day when Albanian architects will win competitions not only here but around the world." That stance has made her a target; march organizer Gent Progni posted a photo of her with a visiting journalist on Instagram, captioned as her using a disabled person as cover to spy. The post gathered nearly 7,000 likes.

Can the boom survive?

Rama isn't thrilled with everything. He complained about a developer who switched from stone facades to a printed imitation "until a certain altitude," and about buildings standing empty or finished off by cheaper local substitutes. "We need the investors to stick with the architects," he said. "Certain architecture needs a certain quality. But compromises are forced by the limitations of the place."

Accusations of money laundering and corruption have grown louder since the Kushner deal. Yet Rama, fresh from his biggest electoral majority, says he isn't going anywhere. His next move: a museum, one room for each of the 60 firms in The Albanian Files — "a big store of dreams, hopes and challenges, illusions and delusions." Its designer, naturally, will be chosen by international competition.