What the Marble Arch Mound architects did next: a skyscraper shaped like Albania’s national hero

theguardian.com:

With his distinctive aquiline nose and magnificent flowing beard, Albania’s national hero, Skanderbeg, has long been a familiar presence in the country’s streets and squares. The 7ft warrior king known as the Dragon of Albania, slayer of the Ottoman Turks, is celebrated in numerous monuments and reliefs, his imposing stature and fiery eyes keeping watch over the territory he fought for in the 15th century.

Now his face will loom larger over the capital than ever before. Construction has begun on an 85-metre-high block of apartments, offices and shops in the centre of Tirana, designed in the shape of Skanderbeg’s head. Images of the project depict an amorphous white tower ringed with balconies that ripple in and out to form a lumpy approximation of the hero’s features, imprinting his profile permanently on the skyline in concrete and glass. Wealthy future residents will be able to look out from the warrior’s eyes, hang out on his ears or dine alfresco on the end of his nose – from which greenery will dangle in an unfortunate snot-like drip.

The surreal vision is the work of Dutch architects MVRDV, who are no strangers to concocting buildings shaped like supersized novelty objects – or “figurative sculptural projects”, as they prefer to call them. Their disastrous Marble Arch Mound in London, which arguably cost the Conservative council its leadership of the local borough, was merely the latest in a long line of cartoonish creations that seem to have been plucked from the depths of a joke shop bargain bin. The architects have designed a museum in the form of gigantic comic speech bubbles, an art storage depot in the shape of an Ikea salad bowl and an apartment complex that spells out the word HOME in the form of its blocks.