The book “The Albanian Files”, presented as an album documenting Albania’s architectural transformation, highlights the role of Prime Minister Edi Rama and his associates in selecting internationally renowned architects for private tower projects in Tirana and resorts along the coast.
On the evening of May 1, 2024, at 10 p.m., American architect Sam Chermayeff received an unusual phone call from his friend and colleague, Pablo Bofill.
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“Edi will call you,” he told him.
At 45, Chermayeff was running an architectural studio based in Berlin and New York, and until then Albania had never been a serious focus for him.
Yet that call would become a major turning point for his studio.
On the other end of the line was not Edi, but Adelajda Roka, a senior Albanian official who heads the Territorial Development Agency.
“Within a short time, we were asked to work on two projects in Tirana, one of 30 thousand square meters and the other of 15 thousand square meters,” Chermayeff writes in the book “The Albanian Files”.
According to him, he accepted “without really understanding what was happening.”
Just a few weeks later, the American architect traveled to Tirana on a visit that he describes with even greater surprise. At the airport he was met and then taken to a villa, which he refers to as the “House of Comrades”.
He later met his first Albanian clients, a group of three businessmen who, according to him, each had G-Wagons, Richard Mille watches and Cartier gold bracelets.
During a visit to the site where a 44-story tower was to be built, they told him he had complete freedom to do whatever he wanted. Chermayeff proudly describes them as our guys.
Asked by BIRN at the end of June about how he entered the Albanian market, Chermayeff did not directly confirm that it was Adelajda Roka who connected him with the clients, but acknowledged that she had been part of the process.
“I spoke with many people besides Adelajda,” he said in a phone conversation. “I can’t say for sure whether it was Adelajda Roka who put us in touch with the clients, but I believe that was the mechanism.”
Sam Chermayeff is just one of 60 architects and international studios featured in the controversial book The Albanian Files, where their impressions are interwoven with projects carried out for high-rise towers and tourist resorts, as part of what is described as Albania’s “architectural renaissance”.
The publication by Swiss house Lars Müller Publishers, with a foreword by Prime Minister Edi Rama, offers a picture of how big names in world architecture are used as a winning card before the National Council of Territory and Water, the institution that under Rama’s leadership approves building permits.
Some of the architects in the book also say that multimillion-dollar projects are commissioned directly through the prime minister, the head of the Territorial Development Agency, or through informal networks, on behalf of private clients.
Writer and publicist Fatos Lubonja, who for years has criticized Rama’s plans for tower construction in Tirana, sees this as “evidence of state capture.”
“The use of star architects is the cover that conceals this activity, which I consider outright criminal, and I think there is room for investigation here,” Lubonja told BIRN.
By the time this article was published, Prime Minister Edi Rama and Territorial Development Agency director Adelajda Roka had not responded to BIRN’s questions.
The prime minister’s phone calls:
For more than ten years, Tirana has been transformed into a frenetic construction zone, where permits for towers and large complexes are justified by the idea of a capital city expanding at a rapid pace.
These projects are backed by the TR030 General Local Plan, drafted in 2016 by Stefano Boeri’s studio based on a scenario of Tirana’s demographic and territorial expansion. The plan projected growth of at least 200 thousand residents within 15 years, but the 2023 census showed a completely different picture.
According to 2023 data, the Municipality of Tirana had 591,427 resident inhabitants, while more than 52 thousand homes in its territory were found to be unoccupied, 40 thousand of them apartments in residential buildings.
However, the fact that the capital was shrinking did not stop the construction wave.
Tirana became an “El Dorado” for foreign architects, often with the direct encouragement of Prime Minister Edi Rama, as the book “The Albanian Files” suggests.
Prepared by editor Anneke Abhelakh, the book includes around 520 projects carried out by sixty international architectural studios in Albania, starting from the mid-2000s, when Rama was mayor of Tirana. However, after 2020 their number increased significantly, both in volume and in the scale of construction, when Rama was in his third term as prime minister.
Some architects recount their experience in Albania with striking candor. One of them is Austrian architect Chris Precht, who says he was contacted by Prime Minister Edi Rama through an Instagram message. His studio has designed several major developments in Tirana and other parts of the country, including the highly controversial “Eden” project, a structure in the courtyard of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Alejandro Aravena, a well-known architect from Chile, also says he was invited directly by Rama.
“Benedetta Tagliabue [Spanish architect] wrote to ask me if I agreed to have my contact number given to the prime minister of Albania. I said, ‘Of course.’ Five minutes later the prime minister called me and asked if I could come to Tirana to talk about the possibility of a project,” writes Aravena, who heads the Elemental studio. His project, a 300-meter tower next to what is known as the Mountain of Tirana, is the tallest yet designed in the capital.
The German studio BOLLES+WILSON has worked in Tirana since the time when Rama was mayor and, according to the account in the book, an Albanian investor had put them in contact. The resulting project was an intervention on the facade of a tower under construction, which, according to their account, “had not met the mayor’s expectations.”
Taken separately, these testimonies can be read as signs of Rama’s preference for quality architecture. But placed together, they show a problematic pattern, in which foreign architects do not enter through a free and competitive market, but through a network in which the prime minister and institutions close to him appear as leaders, inviters or intermediaries.
For Lubonja, in this sense, “The Albanian Files” is not only a book about architecture, but also a political document and a reason for further investigations.
He insists that major projects should be examined in connection with private interests, the legal changes made for them and the criminal money that, according to him, was used to build them.
Lubonja says that “The Albanian Files” also shows that some of these projects — including the proposed 5-star resort by Jared Kushner — had been planned before the legal changes concerning protected areas.
“These projects existed before the law was changed, the businessmen knew it, and this is evidence of state capture,” Lubonja stressed.
Redi Muçi, an MP from the Together Movement, also sees the book as evidence of an informal style of governance in which institutions do not control the process, but merely stamp it.
“It is a kind of display of the grandiosity delusion of a prime minister who considers himself above the law,” Muçi told BIRN.
“The institutions are there to certify informal deals,” he added, accusing the prime minister of playing the role of intermediary and claiming that foreign architecture studios have found in Albania a place “where they can unleash their imagination, bypassing every urban planning norm.”
Not simply a matter of taste
Data obtained by BIRN through interviews with local architects and investors show that invitations to foreign studios come at a very high cost, at least 10 times higher than market prices, and these expenses are passed on to end buyers.
This has also produced a hierarchical system of privileges for international studios and their partners in Albania, directly linked to success in obtaining development or construction permits from the National Council of Territory, KKTU.
If the average design cost ranges from 7-10 euros per square meter, foreign studios charge up to 60 euros per square meter, including payments to local studios. Depending on the construction area, design costs range from 300 thousand to 2 million euros.
Yet for many construction businessmen, this is seen as a safe investment.
Adjon Hanxhari, owner of Hanxhari Group, spent 120 thousand euros on a local design studio for a tourist complex in Vlora, but the project was rejected by the KKTU. He has now returned to the initiative, this time with a foreign architectural studio behind him.
“I was offered a local studio that told me: ‘We have the right architect for your case,’” Hanxhari said in a phone conversation with BIRN. For him, the foreign architect is a guarantee of quality.
“Foreign architects are more dignified. Their projects are more detailed and even take sunlight into account,” Hanxhari said, claiming that Albanian studios had let him down.
“The Albanian Files” provides more details on the project Hanxhari aims to develop, a hotel complex on a rocky slope that drops sharply toward the Vlora coastline and has been named “Vlora Calligraphy”.
This project is being developed by South Korean architect Minsuk Cho, founder of Mass Studies, who during his first visit to Tirana in August 2024 met Territorial Development Agency director Adelajda Roka, who presented him with several potential projects he could get involved in.
Cho writes in the book that, accompanied by Adelajda and a colleague of his, he also met Prime Minister Rama, with whom he spoke about the fact that Albania had once been “the North Korea of Europe”.
At one point, he writes, Rama also asked him about the footprint of the construction area the client intended to build.
According to Cho, after hearing the answer, Rama immediately did the math in his head and concluded that it was most likely too large for the site.
Architect Minsuk Cho did not respond to BIRN’s questions, while his local partner Genti Shtëmbari, founder of the Artech studio, denied that the contact had come from government offices.
“We sought the cooperation ourselves and we work with several foreign studios, because these are large projects and we cannot carry them out alone,” Shtëmbari told BIRN.
He added that foreign architects are sought by investors themselves, because this adds value to their project. Asked about the meeting between the Korean architects and Rama and Roka, Shtëmbari replied that he could not speak about it because he had not been present.
However, an Albanian architect involved in several of the projects in “The Albanian Files” called the whole situation absurd.
“You don’t go to the Territorial Development Agency with a project, you go there for a meeting,” he said on condition of anonymity, fearing that publication of his name would harm his business and the clients he works with.
“Foreign architects are needed to break the law, because Maliqi [Rama] allows them to do what local studios are never allowed to do,” he added.
According to him, the selection of foreign architects is linked not only to taste or quality, but to access to decision-making, which determines which plot gets built on and which does not, as well as the construction intensity.
“They are like pellets that, when fired from a shotgun, spread all over the place. But these are pellets that land where they are supposed to, where the permit is later approved,” he concluded.
Sun, moon, star
Three months after the unusual phone call from Tirana, the 44-story tower designed by American architect Sam Chermayeff received a development permit from the National Council of Territory. The building has an area of 30 thousand square meters, exactly as much as had been promised to the architect in the phone conversation with Roka mentioned in the book. The decision is dated July 31, 2024 for the project titled “Sun Moon Star”, which according to the author represents a celebration of Tirana’s architectural mix.
The tower on Asim Vokshi Street, near Tirana’s New Boulevard, will serve as a residential and hotel building and is being developed by the company Al-Point, owned by Aleksandri Vasili, one of the three men described by the architect as “our guys”.
Contrary to what Chermayeff writes in the book, Vasili told BIRN that the foreign architect had been chosen and invited by him for the “Sun Moon Star” project.
“I had followed his work, I had studied it, as I do with other architects, and I was the one who invited him,” said Vasili, who added that he too is an architect by profession.
For Sam Chermayeff, direct contact with the head of the Territorial Development Agency and Prime Minister Rama does not constitute a conflict of interest.
According to him, in other countries too it happens that institutions approving permits or urban plans are in contact with architects and investors.
“Albania is special, but not special in this case,” he said, adding that he stands by his work.
Even so, Chermayeff acknowledged that citizens’ demands for greater involvement are legitimate, especially against the backdrop of the protests and criticism the book has sparked.
“I think people have the right to demand transparency,” he concluded.
