Tthe IABR (3rd Inter­na­tional Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale Rot­ter­dam) opened it’s doors for the public on Friday. The open­ing event in OMA’s Kun­sthal listed Herman Herzberger, Edi Rama (mayor of Tirana) and Ivo Opstel­ten (mayor of Rot­ter­dam) among others as speakers.

The audi­ence con­sisted almost exclu­sively of archi­tec­ture pro­fes­sion­als, and the opti­mistic words of the speak­ers about the impor­tance of the urban plan­ner and archi­tect in our soci­ety found an easy target. Despite this year’stheme, ‘Power’ is appar­ently less easy to talk about than Social Con­scious­ness or Optimism.

After some words of Herzberger on Le Cor­busier (fea­tured in an exhi­bi­tion at the Nai right now) Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana held the most inter­est­ing speech of the day. He described the trans­for­ma­tion of Tirana in the advent of cap­i­tal­ism. Tirana went from 1000 cars (in 1999) to 125.000 cars in 5 years, from no com­mer­cial space at all to sudden pro­lif­er­a­tion of little barber shops everywhere.

Rama explained how he asked him­self how to deal with this new con­di­tion need­ing urban devel­op­ment, having no budget at all. The cheap­est solu­tion was to paint, and see how people would react (pic­tures).

And when we painted the first build­ing – purple, and orange – I received a call: there are hun­dreds of people on the street, it is a traf­fic chaos. And every­body started to talk about colors – it was the first time that people debated about some­thing which was there, instead of debat­ing what the quick­est way out of the coun­try is.

Read a text about Tiranas city trans­for­ma­tion bei Edi Rama him­self after the break. The ques­tion remains what the next steps have been after this col­or­ful incep­tion – we did not hear about more sus­tain­able urban devel­op­ment hap­pen­ing now.

More about the Bien­nale coming up, in the mean­time check our pic­tures of the Bien­nale at the photo page.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Power, Opti­mism, and Social Consciousness’