Sometimes, symbols are simple. A vainglorious monument is built to commemorate a dictator, an opulent extravagance in a country where bread is rationed, whose people can barely eat. The regime is then overthrown, and after considerable struggles democracy is established. Citizens feel free to appropriate and, none too respectfully, adapt his legacy, until at last an architect is appointed to give permanent form to this popular takeover. Menace becomes playfulness, the closed becomes open, the grandiose informal, the grey polychrome.
This is the story of the Pyramid of Tirana, a 21 metre-high (70ft) concrete cone in Albania’s capital that opened in 1988 as a museum of the life of former leader Enver Hoxha, who for four decades until his death in 1985 ran a reclusive communist state in which typewriters and colour televisions were banned. The monument was his equivalent of Vladimir Lenin’s tomb in Moscow’s Red Square, only with a 22-tonne statue of Hoxha rather than an embalmed corpse. The building’s design, by a team of architects that included his daughter and son-in-law, was both sci-fi and pharaonic, with soaring struts rising to a central oculus.
