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Rama's "favorite" architect defends the "Youth Park" issue

2026-11-15 21:34:00Aktualitet SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Rama's "favorite" architect defends the "Youth Park"

In Tirana, concrete rarely comes bare. It usually arrives wrapped in poetic metaphors and signed by great names in world architecture. The latest proposal for Rinia Park — dubbed Fountain Plaza Tirana — is the purest example of this formula. 

Faced with reactions that describe the project as a new "boil" on one of the few green spaces still left in the capital, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has tried to sell the intervention not as destruction, but as an act of protection.

“We have reimagined urban living in three dimensions — not as a vertical extension or a tower competing for attention in the cityscape, but as a cloud of housing that hovers over the park. Rather than diminishing the park or displacing public life, the building enriches and encompasses both,” Mr Ingels told Dezeen magazine.

But in practice, a “cloud” filled with hotels, luxury apartments, and offices does not float in the air; it rests on concrete columns, requires deep foundations, generates traffic, and privatizes the air of public space. 

The claim that it is adding public square footage by building on an existing park is a rhetorical stunt. For Tirana citizens, what looks like “visionary architecture” in computer renderings translates on the ground into the loss of open sky and natural light — no matter how much corrugated glass the architects promise for the elevators.

Even the promises of “returning value” to the public follow an overused scenario. To soften the resistance of commercial interests (hotel and residences), the project offers as bait an open library, an auditorium and an “inverted fountain” that sprays water mist. These elements serve more as moral alibi than as real needs of a park, whose main function is precisely to remain untouched by construction.

Ironically, the project won against four other international studios — a competition where the fundamental question was not whether to build on the Rinia Park, but who would package this construction most beautifully.

Without a clear completion deadline and in a construction market where the balance between public interest and private profit regularly tilts towards the latter, Fountain Plaza Tirana risks remaining a dangerous precedent. 

When parks start to be seen simply as unused land to build "clouds" of apartments, Tirana is not developing in three dimensions — it is simply becoming breathless. ( Kapitali.al )


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