"Junkspace", "The Arcades of Paris" and "The Urban Edifice" in the context of the city of Tirana

After reading three different architectural texts we had to come up with three pictures from our city relating to each one of the texts and explaining our point of view in a short paragraph. 

Tirana

Text 1 (Junkspace by Rem Koolhaas) 

In the first text by Rem Koolhaas we are introduced with the concept of Junkspace. The term is used as an ambiguous definition of what symbolizes a loss of values in todays society. The author starts his text as a critique of the technologically driven modern architecture of the masses describing it as “flamboyant yet unmemorable”. He attempts to make the reader understand the standstill which has captivated building today, a continuous spawn of processes starting with –re (recycle, rebuild, reimagine) which consequently produce what he calls the Junkspace, an endless sideways staggering of culture. Taking all this to consideration as well as his saying “The chosen theatre of megalomania – the dictatorial – is no longer politics, but entertainment” I have chosen a picture depicting the prime minister’s office in Tirana, which in itself is an Italian building of the 1940s, today carrying a neon light structure at its main entrance. Observing it at a distance, two passages of the text come to mind “scouting for authenticity their touch seals the fate of what was real” and unintentionally realizing our existence in a “kindergarten grotesque”. 

Text 2 (The Arcades of Paris by Walter Benjamin)

In the second text by Walter Benjamin we look at the Paris Arcades, being thrown into the story with no other choice but to view them as a relic of the past. Such a point is unobtrusively being raised throughout the text using different words indicating a sense of something changed e.g. “They have long given way to the hangar”, “they were the hollow mould from which the image of “modernity” was cast” “the last dinosaur of Europe” “nothing of the lot appears to be new” “then it’s the death of the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture” etc. So in a way we are to understand a concept of something ahead of its time at its very beginning which is then transformed into a relic of a different time, where the process itself is the decline of a certain architecture while the arcades remain unscathed in their relicness.  With such a thought in mind I chose as a representative picture the boulevard of Tirana as it was first projected. At the time it was being built (1920s) its size was unthought-of in comparison to the actual city, which consisted of about 20’000 citizens, especially considering how sparse cars were in Tirana at the time. It did however, become a symbolic and crucial part of Tirana's life very quickly reaching its peak during the 1980s under the dictatorship when the most popular way of socialization was going out for “xhiro” (walks) along the boulevard. When going back to Benjamin’s text, a phrase comes to mind which relates to the way the boulevard has transformed its function from e very big, though not necessary, space which held an important symbolic meaning to the social and communal life of the people to what it is today – a very big space which plays a major role in diverting traffic, but holding almost no significance at all on the people’s life  “Glass before its time, premature iron”. 

Text 3 (The urban edifice by Aldo Rossi)

In the third text by Aldo Rossi, it is the city that opens itself to us, no longer as a gigantic complex work of engineering but rather defined by its buildings or more precisely its urban artefacts. So even though we are analysing a city in the background, it is the urban edifice with its individuality that controls the foreground. It has its own history of purpose and alteration, a range of functions independent from form and contained over time, values of spirituality and memory. What is interesting in the text Is how Rossi has defined the urban edifice- the city- “as a great comprehensive representation of the human condition”. In such a sense I have chosen the “Pyramid” as an urban edifice of Tirana. It was built by the communist party in 1987, two years after the death of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, meant to be a museum dedicated to his image. The pyramid’s shape was supposed to look like “Dajti” (a mountain in Tirana) mountain from above, even though it never managed to blend in with the city or retain its context. It was indeed so grotesque that it was called the “Enver Hoxha Mausoleum”. Nevertheless, the museum inside retained its purpose until 1991, when the long journey of its identity crises begun. Its function changed from a convention centre, to NATOs military base during the Kosovo war, to a TV station and then to the victim of a series of vandalism attacks due to its association with the communism era, shockingly reflecting the human condition its people were going through in the journey to re-find themselves. It is a complex relationship that of the pyramid - the city - and the people, one of shared history and a certain detachedness the urban edifice projects as it stands alone in the heart of the city while existing as a great manifestation of its memory.