As I tooled around the city center, much of it seemed unaffected by the protests. In fact, most of Tirana was charming. But weren’t those Molotov cocktails we heard going off during an alfresco dinner? Those weren’t on my drinks menu.
What was on my menu in Tirana, a city of about 600,000 in a country of about 2.3 million, was confusion. Confusion about why the protesters were so angry, and about why the prime minister seemed so unconcerned. In his 13 years in office, Rama, 62, has been remaking as much of Albania as possible with the help of foreign architects. Even the heavily guarded villa where he agreed to be interviewed, a raw concrete building dyed bright red, is largely the work of the Spanish architect Pablo Bofill.
When protesters began demanding Rama’s resignation last May, he was about to host his second annual gathering of architects from around the world, one of the high points of his year. Architects like the Danish superstar Bjarke Ingels and the Chilean Alejandro Aravena, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2016, “pay to come here and talk, and they love it,” Rama says. But this year the get-together, from June 3 to 5, drew protesters with signs that read “Starchitects go home!” Those protests presaged the more violent demonstrations in October and November.
I haven’t attended either of Rama’s conclaves, but what I’ve heard reminds me of my visit to Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, in 2008, which I wrote about for The New York Times. A wealthy industrialist, aided by the artist Ai Weiwei, had brought 100 young architects from around the world to the isolated desert city. Their task was to design 100 villas for anonymous (and seemingly nonexistent) Chinese millionaires. Both situations felt surreal.
