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MVRDV completes transformation of communist-era Tirana Pyramid monument in Albania

2023-10-17T20:11:00-04:00

The transformation of an aging brutalist monument to communism into a new tech education center geared toward teenagers in the capital city of Albania has been officially inaugurated following a three-and-a-half-year revitalization effort led by MVRDV.

The project remade the 127,000-square-foot Pyramid of Tirana, first established as a museum dedicated to the legacy of dictator Enver Hoxha in 1988, into the centerpiece of a new cultural hub and park space located in the heart of the city.

Image: © Ossip van Duivenbode/MVRDV

Brightly-colored boxes are stacked within, around, and on top of the original structure, providing areas for education and events programming, while the addition of outdoor steps to its sloping beams creates intriguing new public space possibilities for visitors. Some see it as a testament to the country’s dogged ability to overcome the collective memory of the Hoxha regime. MVRDV hopes it will turn into a “carrier” for the cult...

'I knew I had to do something': A Bulgarian architect on preserving a monument to her country's ugly past

2022-05-24T12:00:00-04:00

What do you do with a building that was built to glorify an oppressive Communist system but, ravaged by rain and snow and stripped bare by thieves, is now a wreck? Should it be torn down in the spirit of reckoning with history — just as the statues of Confederate generals have been toppled in the United States and monuments to Soviet hegemony have been demolished across Ukraine, particularly since Russia invaded in February?

After receiving two rounds of funding totaling $245,000 from the Getty Foundation in back-to-back years, the ever-popular photographer’s subject is struggling to raise the millions needed to restore it to the former 'glory' seen in what its designer Georgi Stoilov called “morally and materially superior times.”

Bulgarian Architect Dora Ivanova, who is leading a new push to conserve the Buzludzha Monument, says she “does not want to glorify the past” but rather intends to use its grimy edifice as an educational tool that fills a void in her native country’s national conversation about its less-than-sterling communist history.

“We don’t want a museum freezing everything as it was,” she told the New York Times, “but a place for discussion about the past. The idea is to overcome this silence — the shame of talking about what happened.”

...

MVRDV transforms dated communist monument into dynamic cultural center

2021-02-18T14:33:00-05:00

Construction has started on the Pyramid of Tirana, the brutalist monument in the heart of Albania’s capital city. The renovation was designed by MVRDV and will transform the building into a dynamic cultural hub, undoing its previous status as a showpiece of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

MVRDV's design will open up the building, of which the concrete structure will be reused, by stripping the work from previous partially completed renovations. Moreover, trees and other greenery will soften the materiality of the space, while boxes containing individual rooms placed in and around the structure, will create a "village of classrooms, studios, cafes, and restaurants."

"Working on a brutalist monument like the Pyramid is a dream," said Winy Maas, founding partner at MVRDV. "It is striking and interesting to see how the country struggled with the future of the building, which on one hand is a controversial chapter in the country's history, and on the other hand has already been partly re...

Photographers rethink the Eastern Bloc

2019-08-12T13:30:00-04:00

All were built after World War II to cheaply house the masses in a way that jived with communist ideology. Near-identical two- and three-bedroom apartments included amenities like central heat, private bathrooms, and elevators. Standardization and mass production were paramount, though idiosyncrasies—a pop of color here, a geometric motif there—inevitably crept in.

David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka, the dynamic duo that make up the independent publisher/design studio Zupagrafika have trekked the Eastern Bloc in an effort to capture its hidden treasures. Their adventure has been published in a book called Eastern Blocks.

"Eastern Blocks is a photographic journey through the cityscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, inviting readers to explore the districts and peripheries that became a playground for mass housing development after WW2, including objects like houses ‘on chicken legs’, soviet ‘flying saucers’ or hammer-shaped tower blocks," reads the publisher's website.

Oscar Niemeyer's former headquarters of L'Humanité recently photographed

2018-04-14T12:31:00-04:00

Another Oscar Niemeyer headquarters building in France has been newly explored by photographer Denis Esakov. This concrete undertaking was previously home to L'Humanité, a daily newspaper formerly a branch of the French Communist Party. Niemeyer completed this project in 1989 – take a look at its current state.

New photos of Oscar Niemeyer's Communist party headquarters in Paris

2018-04-11T16:40:00-04:00

Oscar Niemeyer's Communist party headquarters in Paris was recently captured by photographer Denis Esakov. Take a new look at the Brazilian architect's concrete achievement, one of his first in Europe.

Gregory Ain, once "the most dangerous architect in America," and the mysterious fate of his MoMA exhibition house

2017-08-11T15:36:00-04:00

Gregory Ain, a midcentury champion of modern architecture whose students included Frank Gehry, is virtually unknown outside Los Angeles today. His left-leaning politics made him the object of decades-long F.B.I. surveillance [...] Even the fate of his most important commission — an exhibition house in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art — is a mystery. That house is now the subject of “This Future Has a Past,” an installation at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village.

This Future Has a Past opened in July at the Center for Architecture in New York and still runs through September 12. The accompanying event Who Was Gregory Ain? on September 7 will feature the installation's producers, Katherine Lambert and Christiane Robbins, as well as other speakers.

How Havana tries to come out of its crumbling shell without betraying Cuba's revolutionary roots

2016-04-25T19:26:00-04:00

I’m on a walking tour with two dozen international architects and urban designers, as we imagine a theoretical future for Havana. The walk is part of a charrette—an exercise that gives professionals and community members a voice on urban development when there is no formal mechanism to do so, as has been the case in crumbling Havana. [...] As the Cuban government slowly loosens restrictions on private enterprise, one wonders if the gentrification of Havana is inevitable.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

On the rapid privatization of public space in post-communist cities

2016-04-21T15:12:00-04:00

From 1917 to 1991 in the former Russian Empire, and from 1945 to 1989 in the countries it dominated after the war, there was no real private ownership. No landowners, no developers, no “placemakers” - in half of Europe. Did this mean public space was done differently, and are attitudes to it different in those countries? [...] observed more closely, public space here is every bit as complex as it is elsewhere in Europe.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Owen Hatherley on a Stalinist city's efforts to "de-communize"

2016-03-24T14:34:00-04:00

The largest remaining statue of Lenin in Ukraine was removed from its pedestal in Zaporizhia last week, the latest victim of the Ukrainian ban on Soviet symbols. But how do you go about “de-communising” an almost entirely Stalinist city?

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Budapest's building boom draws critics of Hungarian leader's "edifice complex"

2016-03-10T13:21:00-05:00

The idea, besides removing as many vestiges of Communist rule as possible, is to create a concrete expression of the nationalism [Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban's] governing party espouses. [...] “These projects, when lumped together, probably constitute the biggest such concentrated architectural project in Budapest in 100 years,” [...] “He is trying to take the existing city and put it back to the shape it had before 1944...The park is a victim of this whole political machinery.”

Learn more about a couple of the controversial projects mentioned:

Selling Cuba (Gehry's already there)

2016-02-01T14:16:00-05:00

“I give it two years, max [...] It will be US business interests that finally push congress into lifting the embargo – they’re all going crazy being shut out of this market.” American architects and developers are already queuing up to be first in line, ready to pounce on investment opportunities when the embargo drops. Frank Gehry sailed into Havana in December, aboard a streamlined yacht he designed for himself, here to “offer his expertise to Cuba” according to a government statement.

“You know that Cuba is at the centre of attention of many people,” Gehry told the gathered crowd. “And in the immediate future it will attract many investors – particularly the tourism sector. But I am sure that you know to be careful with those projects.”

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Owen Hatherley on Kiev's struggle with its Soviet architectural heritage

2015-11-06T17:07:00-05:00

It’s a reminder that decommunisation is a project which might actually be physically impossible to execute in full, which hopefully begs the question — if Soviet Ukraine can't be wished away, what should be conserved, and what should be rejected? [...] The nationalist purging of any traces of socialism from the landscape is a fool’s errand at best, gross historical revisionism at worst.

Related on Archinect:

Pyonghattan & water parks: North Korea's new architectural ambitions

2015-09-14T13:35:00-04:00

“Let us usher in a great golden age of construction,” exhorts one of the 310 official patriotic slogans published this year. The ambition is already evident in the number of cranes that dot the skyline [...]. The most prominent structures are the 47-storey shafts of the Changjon Street apartments, an 18-tower complex completed last year in less than 12 months and nicknamed “Pyonghattan” by foreign diplomats. But other emerging skyscrapers go undiscussed and unphotographed [...].

Related stories on Archinect and our sister site Bustler:

Owen Hatherley's history of communist architecture remains "under the spell of socialism"

2015-09-10T13:52:00-04:00

To [Hatherley], architecture is the physical manifestation of politics. It is power literally in bricks and mortar. In this respect he is unusual and, I believe, right. But he is handicapped at every turn by his belief, worn on his sleeve, in the nobility of the socialist cause. This can be an asset as he wrestles manfully to evoke the spirit of places from which most of us would turn in horror.

More from British architecture writer Owen Hatherley here, and on communist architecture:

The promises and problems of a Cuban architecture market

2015-08-10T21:09:00-04:00

Would-be investors would face other obstacles even if the embargo were lifted... Cuba is still tightly controlled by its Communist government. [...] In any case, most architectural work in Cuba today focuses on the restoration of Havana’s immense historic building stock—two-thirds of which is in disrepair—and on bringing Havana into the 21st century without imperiling its heritage.

Protesting context, not form, of Ottawa's "victims of communism" memorial

2014-12-15T15:41:00-05:00

Blumberg doesn’t understand why a memorial to victims of communism was given such an “incredibly prominent, almost sacrosanct” site. “It is so centrally placed that it would seem to quite overshadow Canada’s true history.” [...] "I have a massive problem, a huge problem, with this memorial going on that site. I think it completely misrepresents and skews what Canada is all about.”

Previously: Winner of the Canadian National Memorial to Victims of Communism

Winner of the Canadian National Memorial to Victims of Communism

2014-12-12T15:23:00-05:00

ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture was chosen to design Canada's future National Memorial to Victims of Communism in Ottawa...The team was selected out of six finalists at the end of the two-phase national design competition held this summer. The memorial will pay tribute to the more than 100 million people around the globe who suffered or perished under communist dictatorship, as well as educate the public about the heavy consequences caused by communism.

As a national memorial, it will also signify Canada's role in offering refuge to those who escaped that oppression. It will be located on Confederation Boulevard beside the Supreme Court of Canada, the Library and Archives Canada, the Peace Tower, and other key federal institutions.

The Eerie Architecture of East Germany's Secret Police

2014-09-22T12:05:00-04:00

The sterility of the photos, especially the images of prisoner bedrooms, hints at the degree to which the Stasi kept a tight lid on dissenters. In prison culture (or at least prison culture as it’s portrayed in the movies), there’s a lot of graffiti: on the walls, in library books, between cells. “We were searching for any scratching or anything in the cells—usually you would think they were sending messages—but it was very clear you couldn’t see anything”

Creepy Photos of Russia’s Crumbling Communist Architecture

2014-08-05T12:51:00-04:00

English photographer Rebecca Litchfield braved radiation and KGB-style interrogation techniques to capture the beauty of this bygone era in a series called Soviet Ghosts. Her work took her to schools, hospitals, factories, and accidentally, a top secret radar installation. “Many of the abandoned buildings are pretty unknown to the public, they are hidden behind tall fences and gates, I think it is easy to just pass without knowing what is inside,” says Litchfield.

Joanna Warsza Curates Architecture Between East and West

2014-07-10T13:23:00-04:00

Buildings perform a variety of functions: They shelter, illuminate, and obscure surrounding people and landscapes. The fundamentally pragmatic purpose of architecture endows edifices with a wide range of functions, but rarely does architecture speak. Curator Joanna Warsza, however, organizes performances and interventions that implore architecture to speak back.

Czech Communist architecture may be protected

2014-04-21T13:34:00-04:00

The new commission for cultural heritage protection, an adviser to the Czech National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) director, has recommended that the state start protecting relatively young works of architecture from the second half of the 20th century [...] “Unlike the architecture of the interwar Czechoslovakia, the post-war architecture has been omitted by protection programs so far, also because its valuable pieces are more difficult to distinguish."

Poland's Communist-era buildings: Love them or hate them

2013-12-19T15:32:00-05:00

The most visible legacy of Communist rule, the grand and often eye-catching buildings have become a source of heated debate in Poland with critics condemning them as an ugly and unwanted reminder of a past best forgotten. Defenders stress their architectural merits and argue that the buildings are now part of the national heritage.

Sozialistische Moderne - Archäologie einer Zeit

2011-07-31T20:11:29-04:00

Still, Bezjak hasn't refrained entirely from commenting on the architecture. He developed strict formal guidelines for his series, photographing it all with a large-format camera and always with the same lens. "I photographed everything that fit within this frame -- in terms of the buildings' dimensions, but also in terms of the possibilities for distancing oneself from the building -- and not the rest," he says.

The photographer Roman Bezjak spent five years traveling around Eastern Europe taking pictures of communist-era buildings. Born in Slovenia but raised in West Germany, he set out to document the everyday qualities of communist buildings. His book recently published book "Sozialistische Moderne - Archäologie einer Zeit" was released by Hatje Cantz Verlag this year.

Ai Weiwei still missing after being held by Chinese police

2011-04-04T06:06:20-04:00

Artist's assistants and wife released but his whereabouts not disclosed by Beijing authorities

See Archinect's feature interview with Ai Weiwei here.