Tirana National Theatre: chronicle of an announced demolition

ABSTRACT Tirana National Theatre was demolished on 17 May 2020. For the previous eighty years and up to that moment, it had maintained its public and societal function, documenting the changes of twentieth-century Albanian history. The Theatre was inaugurated in 1938, during the Italian Protectorate, as part of the Italian-Albanian Circolo Scanderbeg, a multifunctional complex conceived for entertainment as well as for Fascist propaganda. The construction, by the Italian company PATER, used a prefabricated system that well-exemplified the new building technologies and material research developed under the Fascist autarchy restrictions. This paper deals with the construction history of this building approaching questions around fabrics which significance is neglected in favour of new developments. Even if time-specific, architecture is often characterized by a lifespan that is longer if compared to its original construction purpose. Hence, despite the denial of any possible conservation or reuse, the Theatre’s cultural resilience and architectural, historic, and societal significance will continue to reverberate in the void created by its demolition. Unpretentiously, this paper honours the memory of a disappeared twentieth-century architecture, which ambiguous protection history was overcome by a much more sincere guardianship by the civil society and conservation community.