From the beginning, the Pyramid was a curious object. Completed in 1988, just a year before the collapse of communism in Albania, it was a hybrid of science fiction and pharaoh worship—part brutalist bunker, part dystopian dreamscape. It was the most expensive building ever commissioned by the communist regime, at a time when most Albanians lived in dire poverty. It was meant to glorify a leader who had banned colour televisions and Coca-Cola, yet its form looked more at home in a Kubrick film than in socialist realism. Ironically Hoxha’s reign of iron was over almost as soon as the Pyramid opened its doors. The dictator’s museum quickly lost its purpose, and in the decades that followed, the structure became a strange, contradictory presence in Tirana’s skyline to later become a radio station, a nightclub, a conference hall, a NATO base during the Kosovo War, and perhaps most importantly, a symbol of uncertainty over what to do with the past.

The answer, it turns out, was hidden in plain sight. Over the years, Tirana’s youth had turned the Pyramid into an impromptu playground. Climbing up its sloping concrete beams and sliding down became a rite of passage, a rebellious re-appropriation of a space that once loomed with oppression. MVRDV’s genius was not in inventing something new, but in amplifying this spirit. The transformation maintains the bones of the structure but makes it porous, vibrant, and alive. The most striking addition? Steps allowing people of all ages to walk up the very surfaces that had once been too treacherous to scale officially.

Beyond its symbolic weight, the project also speaks to a larger global conversation about sustainability, demonstrating that historic brutalist buildings—so often dismissed as obsolete—are in fact ripe for reinvention. Rather than razing the Pyramid and starting anew, MVRDV has embraced circular economy principles, adapting the robust concrete shell to modern needs while minimizing waste. The interior remains largely open, reducing energy consumption by climate-controlling only the added structures.

The Pyramid joins a growing list of contemporary interventions under construction reshaping the city’s skyline, including MVRDV’s Downtown One, a striking mixed-use tower with a pixelated façade, a ‘vertical forest tower’ by Italian architect Stefano Boeri, and two conjoined skyscrapers by Portuguese studio OODA. Bold in design and ambitious in concept, these projects firmly signal Tirana’s ongoing urban renaissance just as much as the country’s evolving identity.