Painting the Past: Adaptive Reuse of Communist Architecture in Albania

Many articles are written about the new face of Tirana and its transformation from a grey city to a colorful one. Now seems that everything in Tirana is painted in various shapes and colors without limits. This is very interesting from the tourists point of view. They are very impressed and are dedicating their full stories to this colorful transformation.

Below is another article written by Niazi Murataj and published for the website: victimsofcommunism.org. Enjoy the reading:

Picture this: grim concrete edifices tower over pothole-riddled asphalt roads, irregular balconies and unstable expansions jutting out precariously unsupported into the air. Hundreds of thousands of grey mushroom-like bunkers sprawl across a once-pristine mountainous landscape, resembling ugly fungi proliferating after rainfall. The granite sculptures of fallen tyrants, their gazes contorted with spite, loom over public spaces and command undeserved respect.

This type of scenery has dominated formerly communist countries for decades, a daily reminder of the oppression of now-collapsed regimes. The brutalist and constructivist debris belies the civil progress that has been made since, both psychologically and physically. But the concrete and steel relics are notoriously difficult to demolish—and impede both urban development and efforts to move beyond the communist past.
Yet the survivors of communist repression are doing something nonetheless. The governments and people of formerly communist nations have embraced the concept of adaptive reuse: putting old, unused buildings to new purposes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Republic of Albania.

 Walking down the repaved roads of colorful Tirana today, it is hard to imagine the brutality of Enver Hoxha’s 44-year Stalinist regime. Fashionable youths idly scroll through their iPhones under the shade of vibrant buildings, painted eclectically with rainbows, stripes, polka-dots and almost every pattern imaginable. The streets are lined with abstract monuments and interesting designs, best appreciated from a nearby café. Church bells ring and the ezan (the Muslim call to prayer) is heard where previously prohibited under penalty of internment. Yet despite this felicitous façade, the scars of communist repression are still not completely healed.
Tirana’s famous colored apartment blocks were originally grey slabs of mass housing constructed under Hoxha. Just years ago, Tirana was a miserable spectacle. Grey walls of housing and uninspired public architecture divided the city into a senseless concrete maze. Today, mostly due to the efforts of former mayor (now prime minister) Edi Rama, the city’s communist architecture has been reborn.

Educated abroad, Rama was elected mayor in October of 2000 and found a city riddled by public disorder, institutional failure, and aesthetic dereliction. In searching for a solution, Rama had to be crafty; lacking an adequate budget for the forbidding task ahead of him, he opted for an unorthodox solution—a brush and a bucket of paint. The results were far better than expected. Initially met with ridicule, Rama’s project strengthened local feelings of safety, rekindled civic spirit, recreated community and even decreased crime.

Rama’s initiative is certainly ingenious, and could be easily replicated by other local governments or civic groups in postcommunist countries. However, a layer of paint can only go so far: some relics of the past are immutable. Designed to immortalize the ideology which birthed them, communist monuments in Albania and abroad are notoriously difficult to adapt and reuse. Such is the Piramida in Tirana.

Author Niazi Murataj. See here the original article