![\"\"](\"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/piramida2.jpg\")
Eventually, the municipality decided to make it into an IT center for the young, a \u201cnurturing environment for young Albanians\u201d, whose \u20ac12m construction cost would be funded by the Albanian-American Development Foundation. The new uses are housed in an assortment of 34 multi-colored boxes scattered in, on and around the old structure like a careless child\u2019s building blocks, designed by the Dutch architectural practice MVRDV. Flights of steps run up the roof\u2019s exterior, with one section still kept for sliding, so that people can clamber up more safely than before. The new work, says one of MVRDV\u2019s founding partners, Winy Maas, \u201covercomes\u201d the pyramid. It is a squat made permanent; managed anarchy.<\/p>\n
The boxes contain such things as classrooms and workshops, also cafes, startup spaces, a room on Airbnb and an outpost of the French embassy. About half are for the use of TUMO, a nonprofit educational institution that provides free after-school education to teenagers in new technologies. Two are tilted, to make small lecture theatres on the inside, with bleacher seating on the roof. The public can wander between and over the boxes, walk on their roofs, sit on their terraces. They are piled up inside the pyramid, dotted about its roof, and spread about a surrounding open space, which has loose and naturalistic planting by the Tirana-based architects iRI. You could call the composition both village-like \u2013 making informal spaces between the boxes and with the adjoining urban fabric \u2013 and, with its platforms and balconies attending unspecified future events, theatrical.<\/p>\n The interior of the pyramid is free to enter and ascend, which makes the whole ensemble, inside and out, into an open, park-like experience. Presiding over it all is the hacked and scarred body of the Hoxha folly, with its sawn-off beams, cracked marble and cranky communist-brutalist details exposed to view. But the new work \u2013 through selective repair and the introduction of additional daylight, plus those colored boxes \u2013 successfully extracts its malevolence, and reveals some latent nobility and drama.<\/p>\n The project is the latest in a series of efforts to change the meaning and the experience of Tirana\u2019s communist legacy, the country\u2019s version of a more widespread question, which is how to deal with the relics of tyranny. In Berlin, for example, some communist and Nazi icons were demolished, while others were kept in the name of history, and war damage meticulously preserved in the restoration of the Reichstag and the Neues Museum. In Tirana, after the artist Edi Rama became mayor in 2000, they set about painting its grim apartment blocks in bright colors, a cheap but effective way of cheering people up and signifying that the place was changing.<\/p>\n Rama is now prime minister of Albania, and the makeover of the city continues with his support and that of the current mayor, Erion Veliaj. The city\u2019s central public place, the once arid Skanderbeg Square, has been enriched with a shaggy biodiverse mini forest. A bunch of towers is rising around the center, designed by some of the more ostentatious contemporary European architects. The tallest of them is Downtown One, also designed by MVRDV, a block of flats and offices sited close to the pyramid. Here, cubic projections and recessions in its glass flanks pick out a pixelated map of Albania \u2013 a literal representation, says Maas, of an \u201cemerging country\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a dare-to-be-crass moment that is something of an MVRDV trademark. Their other works include the Rotterdam Markthal, where the daily transactions of market stalls take place in a huge tube decorated with giant images of plants and insects, like a 3D super-graphic version of a Dutch still life. They designed the Balancing Barn in Suffolk, a rentable holiday home in the form of a silver extruded house that hovers at one end above its sloping site. They were the architects of the Marble Arch Mound, the catastrophic 2021 attempt to build a temporary tree-covered hill at the end of Oxford Street.<\/p>\n The pyramid, too, is none too subtle. Its construction is rough at the edges. Access for people in wheelchairs is scandalously awful, to a degree that undermines the project\u2019s claims to be accessible and diverse, the inherent difficulties of the old structure\u2019s many levels being unnecessarily compounded by multiple new flights of steps. You could also say that there is an element of PR or propaganda to all the bright imagery of tech capitalism in a country that is still poor.<\/p>\n But, as a way of remaking a troubled past without obliterating it, it\u2019s powerful. The new work honors the complexity of the building\u2019s history, which includes the labor and skill of the people who built it and the adaptive genius of the later occupations. It discovers pride in the past alongside hope in the future. It is fun and joyful. You can believe that the citizens of Tirana will take it to their heart, while people outside Albania will get the message that this is a country both with aspirations and its own irreverent way with public works. MVRDV now have two symbolic tumuli on their CV, in the cities of Westminster and Tirana. Same architect, different clients, which suggests how important the latter are to the success of a project.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/piramida3.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/piramida4.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/piramida5.jpg\")