At 10 in the evening of May 1, 2024, the American architect Sam Chermayeff received a call from a friend called Pablo Bofill.
As 45-year-old Chermayeff writes in The Albanian Files: Freedom and Architecture, Bofill told him to expect a call from a certain ‘Edi’.
“We had never discussed Albania beyond me agreeing that it must be interesting in Tirana,” Chermayeff writes.
An hour later, it wasn’t ‘Edi’ who called, but Adelajda Roka, the head of Albania’s Territorial Development Agency.
“In short order we were asked to do two projects in Tirana,” writes Chermayeff, who has studios in Berlin and New York. “One for 30,000 square meters and another for 15,000.”
He accepted, “not really understanding what was happening”, and a few weeks later flew to Tirana. Met on the airport tarmac, Chermayeff describes being driven to a villa he calls the ‘House of Comrades’, where he met three Albanian men who arrived in luxury Mercedes SUVs, wearing Richard Mille watches and Cartier gold bracelets.
“Our guys”, he writes, told him he would have complete creative freedom.
Chermayeff’s story is one of 60 contributions to the recently published The Albanian Files, edited by Anneke Abhelakh and published by Swiss-based Lars Müller Publishers as a look at the “ongoing renewal” of Albania that has placed architecture “at the center of national discourse and created a specific opportunity for architects”.
Featuring a foreword by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, the book offers a rare glimpse into how multi-million-euro development projects were commissioned directly through the prime minister, Roka, and informal networks acting on behalf of private clients.
The book has been seized upon by protesters who have been taking to the streets of Tirana for over a month, spurred at first by anger over a luxury resort development linked to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a protected lagoon region, but driven on by long-standing grievances over how Albania has been run since the fall of communism in the early 1990s.
Writer and critic Fatos Lubonja, a long-time critic of Rama’s efforts to redraw the Tirana skyline with high-rise developments, said the material contained in The Albanian Files “warrants an investigation”.
Neither Rama, Roka nor the book’s editor, Abhelakh, responded to requests for comment.
For the past decade, Tirana has been subjected to an aggressive expansion drive, with permits issued for huge towers and sprawling complexes in the name of the 2016 TR030 General Local Plan. Drawn up by the studio of Italian architect Stefano Boeri, the plan envisaged an expansion of the capital’s population by at least 200,000 within 15 years.
Instead, the 2023 census registered a little over 590,000 residents, around 375,000 fewer than the figure cited in the city’s own urban plan for 2013. According to the population count, there were 52,000 unoccupied housing units in the city.
The reality of a shrinking capital has done little to slow the construction boom. In that time, Tirana became a veritable El Dorado for foreign architects. The accounts contained in The Albanian Files suggest many have been directly engaged by Rama, who has hailed Albania’s “architectural renaissance”.
The book features around 520 projects designed by 60 international architecture studios, beginning in the mid-200s, when Rama was mayor of Tirana. The increased exponentially in both scale and volume after 2020, during Rama’s third term as prime minister.
Some of the architects featured in the book describe their experience in Albania with striking candour: Austrian architect Chris Precht, for example, writes about being contacted by Rama on Instagram.
Precht’s studio has designed several large-scale developments in Tirana and elsewhere in the country, including the ‘Eden’ project, a structure built within the courtyard of the prime minister’s office.
Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena also writes about being invited by Rama personally, after a Spanish architecture colleague asked whether she could share Aravena’s contract with the Albanian premier.
“I said: ‘Of course.’ Five minutes later, the Prime Minister contacted me, asking if I could come to Tirana to discuss a potential project,” Aravena writes. His studio, Elemental, is behind a 300-metre tower project that would be the tallest structure in the capital.
