What the Marble Arch Mound architects did next: a skyscraper shaped like Albania’s national hero

With his distinctive aquiline nose and magnificent flowing beard, Albania’s national hero, Skanderbeg, has long been a familiar presence in the country’s streets and squares. The 7ft warrior king known as the Dragon of Albania, slayer of the Ottoman Turks, is celebrated in numerous monuments and reliefs, his imposing stature and fiery eyes keeping watch over the territory he fought for in the 15th century.

Now his face will loom larger over the capital than ever before. Construction has begun on an 85-metre-high block of apartments, offices and shops in the centre of Tirana, designed in the shape of Skanderbeg’s head. Images of the project depict an amorphous white tower ringed with balconies that ripple in and out to form a lumpy approximation of the hero’s features, imprinting his profile permanently on the skyline in concrete and glass. Wealthy future residents will be able to look out from the warrior’s eyes, hang out on his ears or dine alfresco on the end of his nose – from which greenery will dangle in an unfortunate snot-like drip.

The surreal vision is the work of Dutch architects MVRDV, who are no strangers to concocting buildings shaped like supersized novelty objects – or “figurative sculptural projects”, as they prefer to call them. Their disastrous Marble Arch Mound in London, which arguably cost the Conservative council its leadership of the local borough, was merely the latest in a long line of cartoonish creations that seem to have been plucked from the depths of a joke shop bargain bin. The architects have designed a museum in the form of gigantic comic speech bubbles, an art storage depot in the shape of an Ikea salad bowl and an apartment complex that spells out the word HOME in the form of its blocks. But it seems they have saved their most banal metaphors for the Balkans, perhaps assuming that fewer of their clients and critics will ever see the buildings in person.

A short distance from where the giant Skanderbeg head is planned to rise, there already looms another tower designed by MVRDV, named Downtown One. Topping out last year, its 140-metre concrete frame makes it the tallest building in the city, and it continues the pop-nationalist theme. Rather than a face, this hefty slab of luxury flats and offices features a pixelated map of Albania protruding from its facade – although the form is so indistinct, it looks more like the concrete formwork slipped on the way up, leaving a wonky mess in its wake. The dramatically carved volumes imagined by MVRDV appear to have been value-engineered into more shallow dimples, giving the impression that the building is prematurely eroding.

“These days, cities around the world increasingly look like each other,” says Winy Maas, founding partner of the Dutch architecture firm. “I always encourage them to resist this, to find their individual character and emphasise it. Tirana has the opportunity of a blank canvas for high-density structures. It can be progressive in that sense and build up character and a sense of place.”

But many local residents aren’t so sure about the sense of place being created by Maas, and the roster of other international architects who have been flown in to reshape the city. A handful of towers are rising around Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square, with four already complete and at least another six in the pipeline. There have been vocal protests against the destruction of Ottoman-era villas to make way for the slew of high-rise developments, with critics bemoaning the loss of heritage and rocketing property prices, and accusations that the projects are being used as money laundering schemes for organised crime.

Two historic villas were demolished to make way for the Skanderbeg tower in May 2020, when the city was in pandemic lockdown. At the same time, the city’s cherished National Theatre, dating from the 1930s, was also bulldozed to make way for a project by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, to widespread condemnation.

“The future of Tirana will be full of ghost skyscrapers,” says Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, a Dutch writer who has lived in Tirana for the last 12 years and closely tracked the city’s development. “I love MVRDV – the things they build in the Netherlands are among my favourite buildings – but then they come to Albania and become lousy assholes. They think they can get away with crappy design, checking off all the stupid nationalist tropes you can think of.”

In a 2018 lecture, when the two towers were in development, Maas addressed the overt nationalist symbolism of designing a building in the shape of the country’s map. “I had a discussion with some of the European politicians about that,” he said. “Because, can you do that? Is nationalism good or bad? But Albania needs it, to show it’s sexy and that it’s actually quite cool.”

Dashing back and forth on stage, speaking like a hyperactive child who had consumed too many E-numbers, Maas rhapsodised his love affair with Albania. He described it as “a country with no money, that drinks only coffee, and where there is nothing to do” – the perfect blank slate for his outlandish ideas, “like a mini-China” with bountiful opportunities for architects. “Developers are getting richer,” he said excitedly, but made no mention of where the money might be coming from to build such heady visions, given the country’s impoverished economy.

A 2020 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime noted that the Albanian construction industry had become a popular hotspot for international criminal gangs to launder money, primarily from drug trafficking. It estimated that €1.6bn worth of “dirty money” had been laundered through the Albanian real estate sector in the previous three years, with 60% of project funding coming from illicit sources. Albania’s own Office of the General Directorate for the Prevention of Money Laundering said that it observed “considerable real estate investments with unknown source of funds”, which it classified as “suspicious”.

Last year, anti-mafia prosecutors in Italy found that the ’Ndrangheta crime syndicate had identified Tirana’s new high-rise developments as a prime opportunity for laundering their cash. In one wiretap, two of those arrested were heard discussing a building constructor in Albania who held three building permits for buildings worth €180m, but had only €10m to hand. “The new skyscrapers are to be sold for €3,000-4,000 per square metre,” one of the suspects says. “And do you know how much it cost to build? €510.” MVRDV says that, in accordance with Dutch law, it runs background checks on its clients using a third-party company that scans for criminal activity, among other things, and there is no suggestion of illegal funds. A spokesperson for the city of Tirana said: “The duty of the municipality is to ensure that construction plans, aesthetics, architecture rules and mobility plans are respected. We understand we live in a toxic political environment in the Balkans and have repeatedly asked opposition leaders to point out: which one of these towers is suspect of such [criminal] activity? To date, we have no response and there has been no official claim with the Tirana prosecution.”

The radical reshaping of the Albanian capital over the last two decades can primarily be credited to Edi Rama, who served as its mayor from 2000-2011 and has been the country’s prime minister since 2013. Rama was a professional basketball player and artist in the 1990s, and Maas says in his lecture: “I know Edi from Paris, when he was a painter”. Rama returned to Albania to become minister of culture in 1998, and embarked on a radical clean-up operation when he became mayor. He made headlines with his policies of painting grey soviet buildings in bright colours to liven up the city, planting trees, creating bike lanes and holding international architectural competitions – reforms that landed him the inaugural World Mayor prize in 2004.

One of the first projects MVRDV scooped under Rama’s reign was the Toptani shopping centre in 2005, which was conceived as a hollowed out pixelated mass covered in giant LCD advertising screens. Having won the competition, Maas heard nothing until a few years later, when he realised the building had in fact been built by other architects, and drastically watered down in the process. The digital facade was exchanged for standard grey cladding panels, while his vision for an open arcade became a generic closed-off mall.

“Projects here are often realised in a totally different way to how the architects originally intended,” says Van Gerven Oei. “There’s the reality of the digital render, always beautiful, brilliant and groundbreaking, and then the reality of Albanian construction companies, who want to do the easiest, fastest thing at the lowest possible price.”

Not to be dissuaded by the Frankenstein mall, MVRDV continued to seek work in Albania. Several unrealised projects followed, from a colossal pile of oblong apartment blocks planned for a lakeside site in 2008, dubbed Tirana Rocks, to a coastal resort for a Russian client designed as an artificial hillside that would glow eerily at night – “better than any James Bond movie,” Maas promised. He explains how Downtown One began as a three-dimensional Albania-shaped building, but proved too expensive, so they decided to imprint the shape of the map on a simple rectangular tower instead. A further commission came in 2018 to transform the striking marble-clad Pyramid of Tirana – built in the 1980s as a museum to celebrate the country’s former communist dictator – which had become a popular place for the city’s youth to scramble up and slide down. MVRDV were appointed, without a public competition, to transform it into a tech hub – smothering the sloping sides with concrete steps in the process. Finally, when it comes to the Skanderbeg tower, the origins are as blunt as you might expect. As Maas recalls: “Then Edi said: ‘I want to do something with history.’” And so the giant head was born.

Local people have joked that, as Rama cultivates an elder-statesman look – his 6ft 6in frame and growing beard giving him an increasingly Skanderbeg-esque appearance – the head-shaped building may end up looking more like a lasting monument to the artist-politician who reshaped the capital, forever gazing out over his vision of empty towers.

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