RELICS OF A PARANOID PAST Vincent van Velsen
Albania‘s history is a precarious one, continuously entangled with war. After five centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, Albania gained its independence in 1912, which was then abruptly ended in 1939 with the invasion by Fascist Italy. This seizure initiated the founda tion of the nation’s Communist Party (later renamed the Labor Party), which came to governmental power after World War Two. Its First Secretary, Enver Hoxha, would become a great influence on the nation, leading the country from 1946 up until his death in 1985. Concrete Mushrooms deals with both the material and psychological heritage of the internal threat of the Hoxha administration and the looming possibility, at the time, of foreign invasion. Hoxha, being a radical Stalinist and extreme communist, first distanced his country from the USSR after Krushchev took power in 1961. Then, when Mao Zedong passed away, he also turned away from his Chinese comrades, leaving Albania isolated in a divided and tense world . The policy that followed this isolation forbid any Albanian inhabitant to have interaction with foreigners, aside from diplomats and tour guides – who were still commanded to keep only formal contact with outsiders and not to take any bribes. As a precautious military measure, Hoxha came up with the idea to start up a de fense system consisting of bunkers, similar to the French Maginot Line, the Nazi Atlantic Wall, and the Finnish Mannerheim Line. In about ten years, from 1972 to 1982, he managed to build a staggering 750,000 bunkers all over the country – meaning one bunker for every four
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inhabitants. A huge amount of resources went into the project, as the costs of one bunker roughly equaled the price of an average family dwelling. However, this bunkerization did not become the military masterpiece it was hoped to be as the project lacked a coherent strategic plan – it is also said to have been a mere distraction from internal problems. Instead of building in centralized and coherent formations, the bunkers were placed so randomly that they could have never been effectively used in the first place. They were located everywhere, from beaches to urban areas, cover ing the countryside all the way up to the barely accessible mountain chains. In the book, local military specialists discuss how they wrote Hoxha a letter about the vulner ability of the defense system. For this action, they were promptly sent to jail. The vulnerability was shown during the Kosovo conflict in 1998, when several NATO bombs missed their targets and landed on Albanian bunkers, destroying them completely. The bombing made visible the inadequacy of Hoxha’s entire endeavor. After Hoxha died in 1985, people burned photographs, trying to erase the memory of his period of rule. A few years later, the Berlin Wall came down and, eventually, Albanian student uprisings led to the country opening up in 1991. This opening up resulted in a million people leaving the country – almost thirty percent to its entire population – causing severe vacancy problems in housing and essential institutional positions. The in heritance of nearly forty years of dictatorship, isolation, and paranoia, had resulted in a psychological ‘bunker
Volume 40
What happens to a country that was prepared for a war that never came? In 1982, following a decade of paranoid leadership, Albania was left with hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers, scattered across the country, built in anticipation of a conflict that never arrived. Today they are potent symbols of the isolationism the country was subjected to under Enver Hoxha. While many would rather forget these concrete relics, Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti see them as an opportunity to turn an infrastructure of conflict into an infrastructure of development. Their book, Concrete Mushrooms, explores how to confront the negative legacy of the past with small tactical gestures.
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mentality’, defined by xenophobia, and an individualism motivated by post-totalitarian trust issues, combined with a lack of tolerance and dialogue. Now, a generation later, there is an openness and ability to deal with the past, and the Concrete Mushrooms project tries to find ways to do so by start ing a debate on how to deal with this landscape of architectural inheritance. The authors take the bunkers as a starting point for six proposals for transformation. Awareness, preservation of memory, recognition of their potential, and sustainable eco-tourism are some of the common threads. The authors, who had been studying abroad, were able to come back to Albania with a fresh view, realizing that the bunkers were the carrier of national meaning and memory. Most inhabitants are so used to the bunkers that they have become anonymous relics and a part of daily life within the urban or rural landscape. In the countryside, the bunkers have become obstacles to agriculture and sometimes function as chicken coops or horse stables. Inside the city, they have become burger bars, kiosks, shoeshine stands, or homes for those in need. They also function quite well as oversized trashcans or toilets. Nevertheless, the vast majority of them are left unoccupied, which means crumbling, overgrown with weeds, or demolished for scrap metal. Meanwhile, foreigners are struck by their ubiquity and randomness, turning them into subject pieces for their holiday photos – which has become one of the main premises of the presented proposals. Earlier ways of dealing with the bunkers included an initiative by the former mayor of Tirana to paint former communist apartments, as well as the bunkers, in wild colorful patterns. A later ironic gesture was named Concrete Cathedrals and aimed at a memorial for those who instigated rebellion, agitating against order, cleanliness, and whatever is socially acceptable. Turning the bunkers into public restrooms in this sense metaphorically showed ‘dirt’ as an offense against order. There was also a music festival, Bunker fest, where bunkers would be used as stages and accommodation. One of the aims of the festivities was to have an ‘open exchange’ and bring people together. Converscene was a similar project that turned bunkers into stages. It was initiated by an architecture student, who cut off three bunker tops, flipping them around, and attaching a platform onto them, resulting in an openair stage. By creating this agora, he wanted to make a physical platform where people could connect, after the isolationism during Hoxha. The book itself poses six options for possible transformations: a campsite, a bed and breakfast, a public restroom, a café, a kiosk, and a gift shop. All are geared towards tourism, such as turning the bunkers into cheap hostel rooms, with a specific focus on beaches and mountainous areas. The options are simple and cheap. For example, three bunkers already grouped together can be connected by a new straightforward wooden structure serving as ‘living room’, or a tent can simply be added next to basic sleeping accessories. The proposals are, in that sense, affordable, sustainable, and easy to create and maintain. However they are a bit modest and don’t consider the possibility of ad-hoc usage by locals. Although stakeholders on all levels (from the state to local residents and students) are broadly integrated into the process, an economy solely based on tourism wouldn’t be the most desirable option; and a broader,
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sustainable and internally reliable strategy would make Albania stand on its own autonomous legs. In this sense the book seems to be mainly a start to dealing with the past rather than an exhaustive manual. The extensive focus on Albanian history and its reconstruction, through interviews, indicates the absence of an awareness, which this book attempts to remedy. As such, it becomes a concept-driven proposal aiming at the concrete heritage and psychological aftermath of the Hoxha era. This step might be small on an architectural level, but socially the gesture remains positive. All photographs by Alicja Dobrucka from her photo series Concrete Mushrooms. http://www.alicjadobrucka.com/ Concrete Mushrooms was published by dpr-barcelona in August 2012.
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