The tower that covers God with concrete

On a day that commemorates sacrifice, in a square that belongs to history, a tower was erected that has nothing to do with God or the city.

On June 6, 2025, on Eid al-Adha, Edi Rama did not sacrifice a ram. He sacrificed another piece of Tirana. With the glory and spectacle of the diverse colors of the carpets, he inaugurated one of Tirana's most contested towers.

Nestled behind the Clock Tower and adjacent to the Et'hem Bey Mosque, in the heart of the city's historic area, that tower is not simply an urban intervention.

Its pentagonal shape is no coincidence. Like the American Pentagon itself, a symbol of command and absolute power, this tower rises as a sign of architecture that does not house people, but carries a coded message: a new rite of sacrifice, a new ideology.

Where once a son was sacrificed for a divine vision, today the city is sacrificed for a personal vision.

This tower, which has defied law and morality, erected on the ashes of Bar Sahat – warned and denounced five years ago – is designed like a giant washing machine: a concrete machine for recycling black money and washing away state sins with aesthetic paint and architectural forms.

The prime minister's opening speech was a veritable theatrical act. With poetry, metaphors loaded with folklore, references to Abraham and "free minds not stifled by regulations," he launched a spectacle where architecture became an alibi, and art a pretext for domination, where the only spectators were his deputies: the architects.

It was not just a speech, but a script to legitimize a system. A beautifully packaged deception for the eyes of the army (as he called them) of 150 invited foreign architects, who, like obedient deputies, applauded – not out of the greatness of the idea, but out of gratitude to the one who provides them with the checks and the “cheapest land in Europe” to build without asking anyone: “incredibly free from the comfort of regulations that do not suffocate” (cit.).

In the name of imagination and architectural dreams, with guaranteed investors who have no demands other than to build quickly, with only one general idea, and with projects where over 1 million euros are paid for the design alone, Albania was presented as the place where dreams come true - not the dreams of citizens, but of those who want to launder money and paint crime with the colors of art.

Like any washing machine that needs air freshener, this new urban washing machine needs architects to give its aesthetic approval. They were presented as an army of visionaries, but in essence they are collaborators in a power machine that uses architecture to produce collective amnesia.

Rama, transformed from painter to architect, from prime minister to "host-man", perhaps for a few minutes he even believed what he said.

But for the foreigners who hang around, the fact that the mayor of Tirana is currently in prison for corruption is just a detail – as long as the spectacle continues, permits continue to be approved without a hitch, and $1 million checks are filled out with precision.

For those of us who live here, models, 3Ds, and animations are like the smoke from burning garbage – waiting for the incinerators that never come, and with our eyes on SPAK: who's next after Erion?

Because we know that behind those names and projects are hidden illegal permits, interventions on monuments, on historical areas, on protected areas, on mountains and forests, on the coast, rivers and lakes.

Behind the one-day splendor of "star architects" lies the eviction of people from their homes, and an economy that survives not on development, but on laundering money made dirty by crime and corruption.

The local architects, stunned by the Prime Minister's poetry, perhaps emerged from the hall inspired – with that false complacency that "architecture transforms not only space, but also minds" or perhaps like obedient soldiers – lined up shoulder to shoulder with the foreigners, before their leader, to whom they have given the power of Chief Architect.

They came together on the day of sacrifice – not to build more just, more sustainable, more humane cities – but to carry out a much simpler mission: To wash away sin with style and legitimize crime with design.

Therefore, the pentagonal tower where this "vision" was presented is not a formal coincidence, but rather it embodies the geometric shape of a new order - where sacrifice is no longer an act of faith, but a propaganda strategy.

Dirty money, illegal concrete, and the illusion of progress enter there, only to emerge later cleansed with the colors of art and the blessing of invited architects.

Therefore, its erection near the Clock and the Mosque was not an architectural-urban choice – but an inverted ritual of sacrifice, because today, in this city, the son is no longer sacrificed for the vision – but the city itself is sacrificed, to make the vision untouchable./ Doriana Musai, Citizens.al