Bjarke Ingels is a pathetic copycat

On 1 October, the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels won another architecture ‘competition’ in Tirana, this time for a high tower inside Rinia Park, a protected cultural monument and one of the last remaining green spaces in the city centre. In her article for Citizens, Erisa Kryeziu gives many details about this project, which by now should surprise no one: the ‘competition’ had not been publicly announced on any of the government’s procurement pages and, although Prime Minister Edi Rama claimed the jury was deciding ‘completely freely’ and without any ‘orientation’, he himself took an active part in the interviews and in the discussions on the decision. As expected, the only company to which Rama publicly gave a suggestion was also the one that won the competition: Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). In response, Ingels declared that he understood ‘the desire and leadership [of Rama] for beautiful things’. All of this, of course, follows point by point the scheme described in the Albanian Files, and, as far as things have come, it seems architects like Ingels wear shamelessness as a medal of honour.

The activist collective Albanian Architects, which has done a great deal of work to highlight the destructive impact of the architect–mafia complex in Albania, also pointed out that jury member Ilir Bejleri, of SON Architects, appeared in the Albanian Files as an ‘executive architect’ for BIG. Jury members Valerio Olgiati, José Selgas and Andrea Caputo are all involved in architectural projects in Albania, while jury member Eelco Hooftman frequents ETH Zurich university, where Rama’s court architect, Freek Persyn of 51N4E, has a project of his own. Meanwhile, jury member Elena Tsolakis is part of the board of the RIBA Trust, the institution which, amid controversy, appointed Rama a member. A truly very independent jury, all of it!

But that is not my main point here. We all know these competitions are rigged. We all know these juries are just for show. We all know the existing legislation on the environment and urban planning carries no weight against Rama’s ‘desire for beautiful things’. Just as we also know that he is rushing to push ahead as many construction projects as possible, before the EU accession deadlines and before his inevitable fall from power. Those pockets needed filling yesterday!

What I want to stress is how unbelievable the lack of originality is, and how pathetic the work of Bjarke Ingels is. Already with the project for the National Theatre in Tirana, itself mired in scandal, Ingels had copied wholesale a project submitted by Forma Architects in the competition for the Busan Opera House.

In the case of Ingels’s ‘Cumulus’, the situation is even more ridiculous.

One might have thought that, when designing a building inside one of Tirana’s most beloved parks, which is a cultural monument and among the last green spaces in a rapidly worsening urban hell, it would be fitting to take at least some account of the context and of the people who will have to live with that building.

But instead, it seems Ingels lazily cast a glance towards the Gallery of Arts, opposite Rinia Park, where he spotted the sad remains of Sou Fujimoto’s ‘Cloud’, took its name, and simply put legs on an enlarged version of it.

Fujimoto’s installation was originally placed there, in 2016, as a three-year ‘temporary’ installation, on the initiative of Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery.

Its concrete base, just as ‘temporary’, rested on the roots of a magnificent plane tree that once stood there, but which was cut down on the pretext that it was a ‘safety risk’ for the 4 July celebrations the American Embassy wanted to organise in that very place.

Of course, by now everyone has forgotten the temporary character of Fujimoto’s installation, which has degraded considerably over the years, especially from the eternal renovation works of the National Gallery in the background. But its main structural elements — a white three-dimensional lattice and overlapping flat discs — clearly form the morphological skeleton of Ingels’s project.

I can tolerate the fact that Ingels has chosen to stick his head deep up Rama’s backside, so much that the prime minister could sing in Danish; I can also tolerate the fact that he is filling his pockets with mafia money laundered in the blood of anonymous traffickers tortured to death in the jungle of Ecuador, or of young people destroying their brain cells in a Berlin nightclub. But the fact that he does this ‘designing’ in the laziest, most uninspired, slapdash way, simply turning a neglected work of Japanese modernist architecture into a tower for some Albanian oligarch and calling the job done, I consider an unbearable insult to aesthetic taste.