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By Beti Njuma/ Curse of a pyramid

2023-05-06 13:03:00, Opinione Beti Njuma

There is the banality of evil according to Hannah Arendt's definition, but there is also the banality of the ugly. The pyramid as it was built after this reconstruction can be safely called an example of this architectural banality and ugliness.

At first they wanted to make it a cultural center, then the National Library, then the National Theater, and the Parliament, and now a fabricated innovation center, which has confused the exterior and interior architecture of the building and the historical memory of the city. A colorful, identityless architectural KITSC that would raise its two architects, Klement Kolaneci and Vladimir Bregu, from the grave.

The latter, who also designed the Palace of Congresses, passed away a few weeks ago with the pledge that no one took any thought for his "child" before turning it into a mess of colors and shapes, like children's Legos.

Yes, this is the "kitsch" of Rama, which, as Fatos Lubonja has said, seeks to offer Albanians another scenic image from the form, but this too has nothing to do with history, the context of the territory and the real life of the people. A project where you find the delusional ambition of the ruler to create a new identity of the capital that dominates the old identities by marginalizing them.

At the beginning of 2010 there was a wide debate about the former dictator's mausoleum that held the record as the shortest-lived museum in the world, inaugurated October 88 - closed December 90. Many names of architecture, media, politics, society were involved against the demolition and alienation civil, letters, history. People who were saddened by the destruction of history and memory and who, unfortunately, today have not said half a word about the transformation into a pachavuru (though it receives architectural awards) of another symbolic building that could have been transformed into a museum of the dictatorship.

But as they are proving by concreting every trace of the past, the Taliban of memory have no respect for the capital's past, therefore they cannot produce history and the future. At most they are stealing and looting what our ancestors have left us. Unfortunately, what Tirana was like will only be seen in photos and documentaries.

The pyramid is looting, mockery, tampering with our history and past in a city that is being destroyed day by day, to leave it without memory, like a psychiatric hospital.