On October 1, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels won another architecture “competition” in Tirana, this time for a skyscraper in the protected cultural monument of Parku Rinia, one of the last remaining green spaces in the city center.
In her article for Citizens, Erisa Kryeziu provides extensive details about this project that by now no one should find surprising anymore: the “competition” had not been publicly announced via any of the government procurement websites, and although Prime Minister Edi Rama claimed that the jury was deciding “completely freely” and with “no orientation” whatsoever, he himself took active part in the interviews and deliberations.
As expected, the only company that Rama publicly gave a suggestion to also won the competition: Bjarke Ingles Group (BIG).
Ingels stated in response that he understood Rama’s “desire and [his] leadership for beautiful things.”
All of this comes, of course, straight out of the playbook of The Albanian Files, and at this point it seems as if architects such as Ingels wear their insolence as a badge of honour.
The activist collective Arkitektët Shqiptarë, which has been doing a lot of important work around the damaging influence of the Albanian starchitect–mafia complex, further noted that jury member Ilir Bejleri of SON Architects was listed in The Albanian Files as “executive architect” for BIG.
Jury members Valerio Olgiati, José Selgas, and Andrea Caputo all are involved in design projects in Albania, while jury member Eelco Hooftman frequents ETH Zurich, where Rama’s court architect, Freek Persyn of 51N4E, has his own little project, while jury member Elena Tsolakis is on the board of the RIBA Trust, which had controversially granted Rama an honorary fellowship.
Very independent indeed!
But this is not my main point here. We all know these competitions are rigged. We all know these juries are just for show. We all know that all existing environmental and urban planning legislation is irrelevant in the face of Rama’s “desire for beautiful things".
And we also know that he is in a rush to push through as many real estate development projects as possible before EU accession deadlines and before his inevitable fall from power. Those pockets needed to be lined yesterday!
My point is how incredibly derivative and pathetic the work of Bjarke Ingels is. Already with the design of the National Theater in Tirana, itself mired in scandal, Ingels had wholesale ripped off a design of a competition entry for the Busan Opera House by Forma Architects.
In case of the Ingels’s "Cumulus", the whole situation is even more ridiculous. One would think that when designing a building couched in one of the most beloved parks of Tirana, a cultural monument that is one of the last green spaces in a rapidly deteriorating urban hellscape, some consideration of context and those who have to live with the building would be appropriate.
But instead, it appears that Ingels simply took a lazy look across the boulevard from Parku Rinia at the open space in front of the National Gallery, spotted the sad remains of Sou Fujimoto’s “Cloud,” took the name, and simply put an enlarged version of it on stilts.
Fujimoto’s installation had originally been installed at that location in 2016 as a “temporary” three-year installation at the behest of Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Its equally “temporary” concrete base rested on roots of a magnificent tree that had once stood at that same location but had been cut down as a “security risk” to the July 4 celebrations that the US Embassy wanted to host at the very same spot.
Naturally, everyone has by now forgotten the temporary nature of Fujimoto’s installation, which over the years has significantly deteriorated against the backdrop of the eternal renovation of the National Gallery. But its main structural elements – a white three-dimensional grid and flat overlapping disks – obviously provide the morphological backbone of Ingels’s design.
I can deal with the fact that Ingels chooses to stuff his tongue so deep into Rama’s behind that the prime minister can sing in Danish, or that he fills his pockets with mafia money that has been washed in the blood of anonymous traffickers tortured to death in the Ecuadorian jungle, or kids destroying their brain cells in a Berlin nightclub.
But that he does so in the most lazy, uninspired, and cheap fashion, by simply turning a neglected piece of Japanese modernist architecture into a tower for some random Albanian oligarch and calling it a day, I find an unbearable affront to good taste.
Shpërndaje te miqtë
