Scanderbeg Square Revitalization

Tirana, in its monumental historic centre, stores, formalizes and constructs part of the history of the 20th century: its harshest, most dramatic, utopian and inhuman, yet, at the same time, surrealistic and ideal aspects.

Construction started in the early 20th century, in the brief reign of the self-proclaimed King Zog, and the Italian occupation introduced the great axis of fascio. Enver Hoxha (educated, like his colleague Pol Pot, in French culture) completed it with monuments, museums (socialist realism) and opera (with Russian architects). The axis comprises government ministries and city hall, with the university to the rear… All the symbolic representation of the new country, concentrated into a single point.

Though sometimes less intensely, architecture has always operated on these terms: representing power, aspiring to an (im)possible eternity. In this respect, to see Tirana is to come face to face—brutally—with your origins, currently overlooked in business or comfortable adaptation.

The presence today of all this material, seen from the outside by a foreigner with no personal history there, is memorable. This sensation is only heightened by the realization that this built delirium could very fast become one big McDonald’s (I hope I am wrong; I wish them luck).

The intervention in Tirana, as a cultural issue, called for a definition of the bases on which a radically transforming intervention should be effected. We propose to conserve the large scale of the space and its differential essence; to intervene on its limits (some interventions at the base of existing buildings seek to democratize them) and launch a whole battery of small-scale interventions to promote a sensual, recreational use of the space that does not currently exist.

We also employ irony as a criterion absent from the place (see for example the intervention around the monument to the mythical Skanderbeg, the national hero, or speaker’s corner).

Irony, recreation, openness and modernity were factors to be combined with the unyielding, military, grandiose, inhuman, abstract thinking that runs through 20th-century culture and is amply represented in this remote place. What we aimed to produce was a new synthesis. Like acting in the revolutions of the 1970s, when dissidents put flowers into the barrels of the army’s guns.