Tirana is pulling off something rare. Instead of razing its past, the Albanian capital is building on top of it, quite literally. Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss studio behind London's Tate Modern and Beijing's Bird's Nest, has designed a audacious plan to marry the Palace of Congresses, a hulking relic from 1986, with a 260-meter tower that will pierce the skyline.
The Palace sits in the heart of power, steps from Mother Teresa Square and the Prime Minister's Office. For decades it embodied the weight of communist rule under Enver Hoxha. Now it will anchor a mixed-use complex that houses offices, a hotel, and restored cultural spaces. The architects could have demolished the original building. They chose something harder: respect.
Preserving the past while building the future
Herzog & de Meuron's approach is refreshingly restrained. They're keeping the Palace's bones intact, focusing instead on opening it up to the street and cracking open its relationship with public life. The wood-lined concert hall will host 2,100 people, upgraded for contemporary performances and gatherings. A new "Palace Garden" replaces the formal forecourt with green space where locals can actually gather, rather than stand at attention.
The real drama happens behind the old building. The new tower rises as a sculptural object, its angular, faceted mesh facade catching light differently at every hour. The architects describe it as shaped by "vernacular logic," which means it doesn't feel imported from some glass-and-steel handbook. It belongs here because it was designed for here. A raised platform called a stylobate knits the two buildings together, creating shared space where the historic and the contemporary can breathe the same air.
This project is part of something larger happening in Tirana. Over the past decade, Tirana has quietly become a laboratory for urban transformation, attracting world-class architects while learning to live with its difficult history. The city is no longer hiding from what it was.
A city reckoning with its ghosts
Albania spent decades in isolation under one of Europe's harshest dictatorships. Bunkers still dot the landscape, paranoid monuments to paranoid times. But rather than treating these relics as embarrassments, Tirana has been converting them into museums, cafes, and gathering places. The former residence of Hoxha himself became an art and cultural space.
The Palace of Congresses project carries this same philosophy forward. It acknowledges that you cannot erase history by ignoring it. You integrate it. You build better things around it. You let people see the contradictions and understand the evolution.
When the project wraps, the Palace will function as a living cultural venue rather than a tomb. The concert hall will host everything from classical music to contemporary performances. The garden will fill with people eating lunch, meeting friends, moving through their city with ease. The tower above will signal that Tirana is forward-facing without pretending its past never existed.
This is harder architecture than demolition. Demolition is easy. Building something that respects what came before while asserting something new requires nuance, skill, and a willingness to let complexity stand. Herzog & de Meuron clearly understands this. So does Tirana.
For travelers, the project matters. It signals a capital confident enough in its story to tell it truthfully. When the renovation is complete, you'll be able to walk through the Palace's concert hall, step out into a bustling garden, and look up at a tower that says: this city is still writing itself.