Last autumn, I was sitting with a prominent architect in New York, when their phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. They finally checked the messages and chuckled. “Oh, the Albanian Architecture Army chat is blowing up again,” they said. “It looks like Edi has some new projects for us.”
Edi was Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania since 2013, who has been presiding over the rapid transformation of the former communist country with a fleet of glamorous building projects. There are twisting towers in Tirana, along with prize-winning public spaces, striking coastal resorts, and many more dazzling visions on the way – all now brought together in a hefty new book, The Albanian Files.
The country’s makeover, it turns out, is partly coordinated via a WhatsApp group (“Albanian ArchArmy” for short) which includes some of the most famous architects in the world. It is a forum where achievements are shared, new projects celebrated, and the great prime minister-patron showered with praise for his bravery and boldness. The New York architect describes the situation in the manner of a superhero movie: Rama sends out the signal and the world’s starchitects rally to the rescue with their daring designs. Look hard enough and you might even see the Albanian double-headed eagle projected into the night sky.
The WhatsApp chat might be confidential, but The Albanian Files is the next best thing. It is a remarkable document, in ways that are both intended and not. In his foreword, Rama describes the book as “a precious behind-the-scenes record” of a process that is “lifting Albania in a way that nobody saw coming”. It is an eye-opening directory of dreams, in which 60 international practices (and not a single Albanian one) lay out their plans for over 500 projects up and down the country.
To Rama’s critics, however, the book is an 800-page, 2.2kg dossier of evidence. They point to the opacity of decision-making, the destruction of heritage, the forced evictions, the trampling of protected landscapes, and the role of Albania’s construction industry in laundering money for organised crime. The publication is full of first-hand testimonies by architects documenting their experiences, and one opposition MP has called it the “smoking gun” – although there is no suggestion that the architects have been involved in any wrongdoing. Rama is right that nobody saw it coming: most of the projects in the book’s pages are news to the local population, which has reacted with fury.
“Starchitects go home!” read one placard at a noisy protest in June, outside a venue in Tirana, where many of the architects in the book were gathered for an exclusive event to celebrate their work and launch the publication. “Where is the public?” read another. Tickets for the architecture festival, titled Landscapes of Abundance, cost up to €200, in a country where the median monthly wage is €700. It came at a charged moment, just a few weeks after huge national protests were ignited by the multibillion dollar plans to develop Zvërnec nature reserve and the nearby island of Sazan into a luxury resort, backed by the Trump family.
Dubbed the flamingo revolution, in reference to the fragile habitats critics say will be trampled by the project, the protests have now continued for over 120 days, with ever-louder calls for Rama’s resignation. Architecture has found itself unexpectedly in the firing line.
“It feels like living in an autocratic kingdom,” says Lorin Kadiu, director of Citizens.al, an investigative news platform that has been tracking construction projects in Albania since 2018. “Not just the lack of transparency, but the fact that we must all be subjected to the aesthetic tastes of one person. The whole country must be painted the way he wants.”
Rama, who trained as a painter, first rose to prominence as the mayor of Tirana in the 2000s, when he made international headlines with his programme of painting the dreary soviet blocks a rainbow of jaunty colours. The cheap and cheerful makeover worked, and Rama was hailed for his maverick artistic approach.
But, now, many of his former supporters feel like his architectural ambitions have gone too far. An open letter, handed out at the protests, denounced the “art-washing of bulldozer politics,” and asked the assembled architects if they enjoy “the freedom to do here what would be forbidden, challenged, or otherwise made impossible in your own countries?” Of the architects contacted by the Guardian, only one responded, to say they do not do anything in Albania that they would not be allowed to do in another place. They added that “the freedom in Albania is certainly alluring and as such the personal responsibility is greater”.
As Rama writes pointedly in his foreword to The Albanian Files, the architects are attracted to work in Albania by the “freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms”. The pages are studded with visions for virgin coastlines, verdant forests, and pristine dunes and lagoons. In Gjipe, a bay that many consider the last virgin beach in southern Albania, Dutch firm MVRDV has proposed a mirrored glass hotel that would span the gorge, “like a jewel on the coastline”.
It comes hot on the heels of their apartment tower in Tirana shaped like the head of Skanderbeg, Albania’s national hero (which also bears a striking resemblance to Rama). In the protected dune area of Rana e Hedhun, the venerable Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza has masterplanned a hillside development with a cable car and a tower-block on the beach.
A few pages later, Swiss maestro Valerio Olgiati proposes a cluster of concrete towers rising from the sand, peppered with defensive windows. It looks as if he might be preparing to fend off an invasion from the sea.
The coastal glow-up continues with the Florentine luxury yacht designer Luca Dini (studio mission: “to astonish even the most discerning”). He presents an illustrated voyage through his 17 projects, including the Life Marina Complex, spanning seven kilometres of virgin coastline near Saranda, and the Atara resort, with a golden “crown” that hovers above the cliffs like another military lookout post. It almost reaches parody when his comic-style illustrations conclude with an image of a super-yacht hurtling above a skyline, with the designer himself declaiming from the deck: “[we] create spaces that harmonise with the environment.”
The book’s editor, Anneke Abhelakh, asked the architects to submit their own texts, and they are striking in their honesty. At times it reads like a hot-mic transcript. “Because there are not many rules and my clients care very little for the context,” writes Berlin-based architect Sam Chermayeff, “we are forced to think through our own values.” He recounts the “truly wild” experience of working in Albania, including how he was called, out of the blue, by one of Rama’s associates, and soon asked to design two towers in Tirana, totalling 45,000sq m – quite something for a designer better known for experimental kitchens.
“Of course I agreed,” he adds, “not really understanding what was happening.” Contacted for comment, Chermayeff responded: “I do ask Albanian clients the same questions that I ask of clients in any country and am equally assured,” adding that “as in Germany or the US, I really do not know more than what I am told,” and that he does not work in or near protected areas. “I do not do anything,” he added, “I would not do at another place.”
Austrian architect Chris Precht describes how he was approached on Instagram by Rama himself, “asking if I would be interested in working in Albania”. He now has 29 projects to his name, including a €4m “Garden of Eden”, built in the courtyard of the prime minister’s own office.
“It is an unimaginable reality,” says a campaign group of Albanian architects and urban planners, Arkitektët Shqiparë, which has created an online database of all of the projects – published in Albanian, unlike the book. “A narrow group of foreign architects is contacted directly by the prime minister’s office and receives projects without a competitive procedure.”
The foreign architects describe it differently. “Rama never appoints the architects himself,” one member of the ArchArmy group tells me. “But he makes introductions to developers. And it is understood that, if they choose one of his architects, they [the developers] will get permission to build what they want.”
Rama has consistently denied the allegations. In a furious interview with CNN in June, he denounced the claims of corruption as “fake news”. He has long maintained that the wider protests have been stoked by the US president’s enemies, including Iran. “If it were not Jared Kushner,” he said, “nobody would give a shit about flamingos, about Albania, about nothing. It’s the whole hate against Trump that creates all this scrutiny.”
Contacted by the Guardian, the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment in detail but called the allegations “hearsays” and “bitter assessments”. During a speech this week to launch the competition for a new tower, Rama insisted the competition juries are “mostly architects, urbanists and academics who are entirely free,” that “the Albanian side is in the minority” and that there is “never any orientation or influence” on the jury. He added that today Albania “is the largest open ‘university’ in architecture,” as young Albanian architects have the opportunity “to meet, to follow, to work concretely with masters”.
The book’s subtitle is Freedom and Architecture, and there is an air of carte blanche to many of the designs. “Working as an architect in Albania is liberating,” writes the Belgian Xaveer De Geyter, alongside his proposal for a colossal trio of M-shaped towers for the port of Saranda, “provoking a degree of freedom that sometimes leaves us in a cold sweat.” Spanish studio Arquitectura-G praises Albania’s permitting process as “significantly faster and less restrictive” than elsewhere, driven by “a clear vision coming from the prime minister.” Portugal’s Manuel Aires Mateus concurs: “There are times when things have to be top-down.”
The palpable thrill of building on virgin terrain is also evident. Japanese doyen Kengo Kuma describes the exhilaration of flying over Albania in a helicopter. “I found it very exciting,” he writes, “as most of the nature is untouched.” In Asia, he adds, “it is very difficult to find a project in such ‘virgin land’”. The Berlin-based Indian architect, Anupama Kundoo, talks of the opportunity to create, “free from the baggage” of Europe and other “developed countries”.
Kundoo is working on a masterplan for a “laboratory settlement” of 50,000 people in the protected Divjakë-Karavasta national park. Such a project has only been made possible by a controversial 2024 law, which allows the construction of five-star resorts in protected areas, from which the Trump-backed plan in Zvërnec also benefits.
There is no suggestion that any of the architects named in this article are breaking any laws.
“The developers are in a hurry,” says Kadiu. “There is a sprint to build as much as possible before these laws are repealed.” Pressure is growing. Albania has entered the concluding phase of its EU accession negotiations, but these lax regulations remain an obstacle. Both the 2024 law, and 2015 legislation that gives preferential treatment to “strategic investors”, were criticised by an EU report last year as being in conflict with its standards.
A European Parliament resolution in June this year “expressed serious concerns” and called for an “immediate moratorium on new permitting procedures, construction works and development interventions” within protected areas. Rama continues to defend both laws as pragmatic, modernising policies that balance environmental conservation with high-value economic development.
Beyond fears for the environment, and the opaque permitting and procurement processes, another burning question remains: how can one of the poorest countries in Europe afford to build these extravagant schemes? There has been an astronomical rise in property prices, but no comparable increase in wages or bank mortgages being issued, leading critics to suspect that dark money is involved.
The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime identifies Albania’s real estate and tourism sectors as major sites of money-laundering, noting that the construction sector is “heavily infiltrated by illicit funds”. Its 2020 report estimated that €1.6bn of “dirty money” had been laundered through Albanian real estate in the previous three years. As I reported in 2022, leaked wiretaps revealed Italian mafia figures discussing how Tirana’s high-rise boom was a prime opportunity for laundering their cash, with construction prices of roughly €500 per sq m paling in comparison to the listing prices of up to €4,000 per sq m.
Albania’s own Special Prosecution Office against Corruption and Organized Crime, SPAK, is making progress. In June, it seized €150m of assets, including apartments, villas and commercial properties, tied to an alleged cocaine trafficking network. The same month, Pëllumb Gjoka, once named a “strategic investor” by the Albanian government with approval to build a €52m resort on the coast, was sent to prison for ordering mob hits.
Research by Citizens.al shows that several projects in The Albanian Files are linked to ongoing SPAK investigations (none of the architects named in this article are implicated), alleging criminal capital has been funnelled through shell companies, construction contracts and property transactions. Over 40% of the projects in the book don’t even mention who the client is, leading many to ask: why the opacity?
One former member of the ArchArmy is rueful about the way things have turned out. “Like the others, I joined with a real conviction that this could be a positive change for the country,” they tell me. “Rama knew Albania was going to develop very quickly, and he didn’t want to fuck it up. It’s better to have some good architects involved to make sure it turns out halfway decent, rather than people building generic apartments along the coast without any control.” The architect says they backed out after being part of a competition jury that “didn’t feel democratic” and the fact that issues around land ownership “always felt very vague”.
They add: “Rama still very much believes that he’s doing the right thing for the country. It’s a classic example of what happens when you think you’re the benevolent leader, but you stay in power too long.”
This sentiment is echoed in one of the most revealing contributions to the book. Reinier de Graaf, of Dutch firm OMA, writes an open letter to Rama – intended as a parody, but the humour is moot. “Given Albania’s enduring status as an enlightened architectural patron,” he writes, “our profession would benefit greatly if the country never had another election again, and if you … would just continue as president for life – maybe even king.”
He adds: “In a world of autocracies, may we have one benevolent autocrat with taste?”
