The Freedom to Say No

In his June 22 examination of the architectural anthology, Citizens.al director Lorin Kadiu reports that 41% of its projects do not name their client. His count comes from a database he assembled from the book’s technical tables. The designs are available for inspection; the person or organization commissioning them is not always identified beside them.

That is a peculiar way to meet your possible future. You can see what it might look like before you know whom to question about it.

Oliver Wainwright’s October 2 Guardian feature brings renewed attention to the book and to the disputes surrounding Albania’s construction boom. Celebrated international architects describe extraordinary opportunities. Critics describe opaque decisions, threatened landscapes and a public pushed outside the process. Between those accounts sits a cultural question that cannot be settled by choosing the prettier rendering: when someone offers to transform your surroundings, what part of the transformation remains yours to decide?

A book of possibilities, not a completed country

The publisher, Lars Müller, describes The Albanian Files: Freedom and Architecture as a collection of contributions from sixty international offices working in Albania. Edited by Anneke Abhelakh, with a foreword by prime minister Edi Rama, it contains reflections on buildings both proposed and built. The publisher lists 796 pages and approximately 1,500 illustrations.

Those distinctions matter. A book of proposals is not a record of hundreds of completed developments. Nor is inclusion evidence that a project has a permit, financing or a construction date. Kadiu’s June accounting separated built projects from those under construction and awaiting permits, while noting that many others had an undisclosed fate. Treating the entire catalogue as one accomplished land grab would reproduce the promotional fantasy in reverse: the picture would become the fact.

Still, the book has significance beyond its delivery schedule. It gives architectural ambition a collective form. Individual projects become a national transformation, and the participating offices become witnesses to the opportunity.

There is nothing inherently suspect about that opportunity. Better public spaces, serious design and investment in the built environment are legitimate aspirations. Wainwright’s account includes an unnamed architect who initially joined Rama’s circle believing that good designers could help prevent uncontrolled, generic coastal development. That is an intelligible professional hope. It deserves consideration rather than an automatic sneer.

The difficulty begins when confidence in the quality of the proposed work starts doing the work of public authorization. An architect can have an excellent answer to how a building should stand and no adequate answer to whether this site should hold it. Expertise does not become less valuable when its jurisdiction ends. It becomes more trustworthy when it knows where the boundary is.

The attraction of fewer obstacles

Wainwright quotes Rama’s foreword describing a “freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms.” The phrase also appears in Kadiu’s reading of the book. It offers a revealing definition of liberation: freedom measured by the resistance a project no longer encounters.

For a designer accustomed to stalled decisions and restrictive procedures, the attraction is easy to understand. Delay can be wasteful. A rule can protect incumbents rather than the public. An objection can be opportunistic. No serious account of planning should pretend every barrier is wise merely because it obstructs someone powerful.

But “no” covers very different things. It can be a pointless administrative hurdle. It can also be a resident defending access, a challenge to a property claim, or an environmental limit that makes an attractive proposal unacceptable. Removing the word does not distinguish among those functions. It makes the distinction disappear.

This is where the psychological bargain becomes interesting. The person who makes your work possible can begin to seem like the person who understands reality best. Their decisiveness is tangible; the concerns outside the room arrive as complications. Gratitude for an opening can quietly become loyalty to the arrangement that provided it.

That is a risk inherent in patronage, not a diagnosis of every architect in Albania. The sources do not establish what each designer knew, believed or investigated. They do, however, record how some contributors describe the experience. Wainwright quotes Arquitectura-G praising a permitting process that is faster and less restrictive, and Manuel Aires Mateus saying there are times when things must be top-down. These are professional perspectives worth examining precisely because they need not be cynical to carry consequences.

A person can sincerely want to improve a place while finding the people already there inconvenient. Sincerity will not resolve the planning dispute.

The missing name changes the conversation

Kadiu’s client count gives the argument a more useful foothold than speculation about motives. He reports that the book allowed studios to decide whether to fill in the developer or client field. Seven studios, in his accounting, identified no developers for any of their listed projects.

This is a claim about disclosure in a publication. It does not establish that the identities are unavailable in every public record, that unnamed clients have committed wrongdoing, or that every omitted field conceals something. The underlying planning and procurement files have not been independently audited for this article.

Yet the omission still matters to the object the reader actually holds. A design presented without its commissioning relationship is easier to encounter as pure imagination. Questions about ownership, incentives and responsibility require another search. The aesthetically interesting information is together; the information needed to challenge the proposal may not be.

That division shapes attention. It invites readers to become critics of form before they can become informed participants in a decision. We can argue about whether a tower is beautiful while lacking the details needed to ask who benefits from putting it there.

Kadiu’s response was to build a database and cross-reference projects with Citizens.al’s reporting. That work is itself part of the story: the polished collection becomes material for an inquiry its celebratory presentation does not complete. A catalogue can help scrutiny, even unintentionally. The point is to follow its leads rather than mistake its omissions for either proof of innocence or proof of guilt.

For a public-facing project record, a modest standard would go further. Name the commissioning entity. State the proposal’s current status. Link the applicable decision and the process through which it can be questioned. A beautiful drawing need not carry every legal document. It should not be the end of the trail.

Neither taste nor accusation is a verdict

The dispute is not one in which the government has offered no defense. According to Wainwright, Rama’s office characterized the allegations put to it as hearsay and bitter assessments. The Guardian also reports Rama’s defense of architectural competition juries: mostly architects, urbanists and academics, with the Albanian side in a minority, and, he maintained, free from direction or influence.

That response addresses an important question about professional selection. It does not, by itself, settle a different one about public power over the development being selected. An independently judged competition could choose the strongest design within a brief whose site, scale or purpose remains contested. The jury’s freedom and residents’ influence require separate evidence.

The architects’ responses deserve the same precision. Sam Chermayeff told the Guardian that he asks Albanian clients the same questions he asks elsewhere, that he does not work in or near protected areas, and that he does nothing he would not do in another place. Those statements should accompany scrutiny, rather than vanish because they complicate a cleaner indictment.

Wainwright explicitly says there is no suggestion that the architects named in his article have broken laws. His discussion of alleged criminal money entering construction is not evidence that every featured project is financed that way. This analysis makes no such claim.

The cultural issue survives those limits. Lawfulness is essential, but it does not exhaust the question of how people are treated in decisions affecting their surroundings. Equally, a protest does not automatically establish that its preferred outcome is just. Existing residents may disagree with one another; future residents have interests too. A credible process has to make room for those conflicts without treating the loudest group, the most famous designer or the most decisive official as the entire public.

What would count as being heard?

One protest placard in Wainwright’s account asked, “Where is the public?” It is a sharper question than whether international architects should simply leave. It asks for the location of a power, not merely the nationality of its holder.

The coherenceist test is useful here because it refuses to confuse a unified vision with a legitimate one. Order can be achieved by coordinating experts around a patron. Legitimacy requires the feedback of affected people to enter the arrangement with some capacity to change it. A city can look coherent while its decision-making excludes those who must live with the result.

That capacity needs to be observable. At what stage can a proposal change? Can a resident obtain the relevant documents before a decision becomes practically irreversible? Who must answer an objection, and where is that answer recorded? Is there a meaningful route to review? These are proposed tests, not claims that every Albanian project fails them.

The distinction also prevents “consultation” from becoming another decorative finish. A meeting may be courteous and still leave all consequential choices untouched. Conversely, a process can hear an objection seriously without granting it a veto. Being heard means receiving a reasoned answer within a procedure that permits revision, not a guarantee that one’s preference wins.

There is a reciprocal obligation on the professional who receives unusual freedom. Access to a consequential commission brings reasons to ask who is absent from the conversation, what information remains unavailable and which assurances can be checked. The answer cannot be supplied by the intensity of the designer’s good intentions. It has to survive contact with someone who does not share the brief.

For readers abroad, there is a smaller version of the same task. Before celebrating a spectacular proposal—or condemning it from a photograph—follow it back to the client, the site and the decision. Keep the possibility of good architecture open without making admiration a substitute for inquiry.

The empty client field is a place to begin. So is the proposal whose status nobody can explain. The next useful image of Albania’s future may still be a rendering. Beside it should be a legible account of who can ask for something different, and how that request could matter.