The Negotiated Collage

Yesterday, The Guardian reported on an extraordinary architectural experiment taking place in Albania.¹ Prime Minister Edi Rama spent the past decade cultivating relationships with some of the world’s foremost architects, and around 60 international practices have now proposed more than 500 projects across the country, from tall towers in Tirana to sparkling hotels on previously untouched beaches. In the introduction to The Albanian Files, the 800-page book that collects these visions, Rama describes what draws architects to Albania as »freedom from ‘no’«.²

A city is a negotiated collage.

As an architect, it’s hard not to understand the attraction and find the proposition intoxicating. Imagine being invited to a country and basically told: here’s the land, what would you like to do with it? Governments have occasionally given architects remarkable freedom to imagine cities at enormous scale – Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer had Brasília; Le Corbusier had Chandigarh.³ Such experiments can produce buildings and places unlikely to emerge from an accumulation of more cautious decisions. Albania is unusual in that the visionary impulse swaps a single masterplan for hundreds of independent propositions. A building can be excellent. So can the building next door. But sixty excellent architectural decisions do not necessarily produce an excellent urban one.

The economist Thomas Schelling spent much of his career studying precisely this problem: how individually reasonable decisions can produce collective outcomes that nobody intended. In his models of residential segregation, mild individual preferences can generate highly segregated neighbourhoods.⁴ The whole becomes something quite different from the sum of its parts.

This is perhaps what’s missing from Albania’s catalogue of possibilities: the connective tissue between the projects. Who decides that two buildings belong together? Who decides that a beautiful resort shouldn’t get built, because another beautiful resort would make the landscape better? Who decides what the space between them should become?

Journalist Jane Jacobs argued that countless local decisions give cities their complexity.⁵ Urban planner Robert Moses held the opposite view: a city could be transformed through a powerful vision from above.⁶ Albania is an odd hybrid of the two – political power concentrated at the top, a distribution of architectural authorship divided between independent practices below. Not quite Jacobs’s gradual negotiation, but also not quite Moses’s coherent spatial plan.

In 2008, architects Herzog & de Meuron and artist Ai Weiwei invited 100 architects to design proposals for Ordos in Inner Mongolia.⁷ The result was an extraordinary catalogue of architectural ideas, but the development never became the city it set out to be. Architecture turned out not to be the missing ingredient. Saudi Arabia’s ongoing NEOM project, meanwhile, offers a counterpoint. Similarly attracting a large cast of international architects, it begins from a strong proposition about the urban system itself. The Line is not a collection of independent commissions waiting to discover what city they might form. It starts with an idea of the city, formulated by LA firm Morphosis, and asks architecture to inhabit it.⁸

A city is a negotiated collage.

This was the proposition Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter developed in their book Collage City – not the totalising vision of the masterplanner, but also not the random accumulation of independent objects.⁹ A city can contain different authors, periods, and ambitions without resolving them into a single style. The negotiation matters. One building changes the possibilities for the next. The city becomes a record of successive decisions, each a response to what has already happened.

Maybe Albania is attempting something stranger: a coherent national transformation through a multitude of architectural visions, without first deciding how those visions should relate to one another.

The harder, slower path is to let ambitious ideas encounter, alter, and occasionally refuse one another. »Freedom from no« sounds like the ultimate condition for architectural invention. But perhaps the opposite of »no« isn’t freedom. Perhaps it’s simply »yes«. And a collection of unchecked yeses doesn’t make for a city.

What makes for a city is when one yes changes the next.

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