Albanian Bunkers Score Cool Retrofits

Say “green” or “environment” and we immediately thinking about solar, cute harp seals, big oil, activists, or that bio-fueled Mercedes.  But one way I think about the environment is aesthetics:  yes, humans can have an awful effect on our land, water, and air . . . but also on our surroundings.  I blanch at the awful strip malls that have marred Los Angeles, I hated the Soviet-style apartment buildings in Korea, and when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe they painted my mother’s high school in Fallon, Nevada, bright lime green.

One nation scarred misguided architecture is Albania.  During Enver Hoxha’s paranoid Communist regime, Albania’s military and citizens built about 700,000 concrete bunkers, appearing like pimples over this small southeastern European country’s landscape.  The North Koreans would blush:  these are everywhere, hideous symbols of a xenophobic regime.  Perhaps Hoxha’s posse was scared of Italians looking for cheap beach vacations.  The effects these bunkers have on these people is not so amusing—they are reminders of a nightmarish regime, and now, their dilapidated state often causes injuries and even drownings.

Albania’s slowly recovering, despite collapsed pyramid schemes, traumatic privatization, and now a global recession.  One town was finally able to destroy their bunkers with the help of a retrofitted Chinese tank.  Unfortunately, removing and destroying them is too expensive of a project at this point.  Some Albanians even think they should stay and oppose erasing this chapter in their history, even if it had been a bleak period.  And one entrepreneur even turned one into a bistro.  Tourists, meanwhile, are often curious about odd little domes.

Whatever the results may be, they are a cool way to redesign a chapter in Albania's past . . .