“Concrete mushrooms” project to turn bunkers into hostels

Since the fall of Communism, bunkers have abandoned their military duty to become the venue for lovers’ trysts and, in the most desperate cases, homes for the thousands of internal refugees. Farmers use them for chicken coops. Neophyte businessmen have converted well-located bunkers inside the cities into kiosks, burger bars, shoeshine stands, even discos. In cobble-stoned Gjirokastra, one of Albania’s southern cities, one bunker is adorned with a cross, a kind of bunker-turned-church. Others are painted with psychedelic colors to resemble large flowers. Today, even though Albanians ignore them or just forget about them, they are still there trying to show their potential and disposition to be used.
Two Albanian graduate students have come up with an original idea. Cheap hostel – that’s what the future function of the bunker should be, having the same commodity anywhere in Albania, there is not just one, there are supposed to be around 750 000 of them. Any of the tourists interested in adventures and nature, can enjoy natural resources by spending their nights in local, cheap hostels without being obliged to carry their camping tents.
“Concrete Mushrooms” is a project initiated as an idea for research by two Albanian graduate students Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti, under the guidance of architect Stefano Boeri at the Politecnico di Milano’s Landscape Architecture department. The main purpose of the project is to emphasize the appreciable assets of Albania such as bunkers which are vast in number, underappreciated as a resource and present across all the rich and beautiful landscape of Albania. The priority of “Concrete Mushrooms” project is facing the symbol of xenophobia (bunker) with deliberate awareness for the purpose of inverting its meaning, the preservation of the memoir of a significant period of the Albanian history, giving bunkers value instead of having them as burden and as a result the promotion of an underdeveloped tourism such as Eco- Tourism which has an enormous potential at the same time growing the financial viability, social and environmental sustainability.