House of Leaves House of Leaves

2015


  • From: gennaio 2015
  • To: maggio 2017
  • City: Tirana
  • Country: Albania
  • Type: museo
  • Area: 800 mq
  • Client: Governo dell'Allbania-Ministero della Cultura
  • With: Daniele Ledda  xycomm Milano
  • Collaborators: Arch. Paola Frigerio, Arch. Mike Dolinski and Yiwei He
Albanian National Museum of Secrete Surveillance

This semi-hidden house in the center of Tirana was until recently the headquarters of the Sigurimi, the infamous Albanian secret service that operated during the long dictatorship of Enver Hoxha.
The site, strategic in the geopolitics of the city, had to appear like a normal urban villa with its garden.
The project to transform the House of Leaves into the National Museum of Secret Surveillance was born from the will of the Albanian Ministry of Culture in 2014 and was developed by a team of historians, by the victims' associations, by technicians and by a local workforce.
The House of Leaves is already an iconic presence in the city, a symbol of a past that one would like to forget and of an open and democratic future that has led the government to a busy program of recovery of the structures of the communist regime.
The transformation of this "House" into a place of Memory requires delicate and careful interventions because the condition of abandonment is part of its history as are its wounds to be healed but not erased.
This building, however you walk through it, reveals, together with the dozens of objects and listening and spying stations, its inconsistencies and its deletions. Slowly the levels of the story were revealed, the objects recovered, the documents exhibited, giving the visitor time to think and remember.





WEBSITE

PRESS

Area n.174 Studio Terragni Architetti / House of Leaves
How One Architect Turned Albania’s Dark History into Art
Rustling of the Leaves


































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