“80 Years. From Vittorio Ballio MORPURGO to Mario PETRESCHI…”

Exhibition. The Central Building of the Bank of Albania.

Tirana, Albania.

30 October – 16 November 2018.

This exhibition comes on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the construction of the Central Building of the Bank of Albania. For decades the Headquarters of the Bank of Albania has been the most important monument of Tirana’s central square and, over the years, has shaped the identity of this square, being at the same time an identity-defining part of the capital’s architectural ensemble.

The building of the Bank of Albania in Tirana was designed by the well-known Italian architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo and was inaugurated on 30 October 1938. Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo was one of the architects of the rationalist school of Italian architecture, one of the passionate lecturers at the Faculty of Architecture of the “La Sapienza” University in Rome, Head of the Chair of Architecture and Urbanism. Known in Albania for his collaboration with Florestano di Fausto on the project for the center of Tirana, he had designed the Bank of Durrës and that of Korça in the years 1925–27, in which he took care to build with a monumentality worthy of these institutions, so as to bring the symbolism of the economic development of the Albania of the time. The same characteristics would also influence the long design path the architect would follow to worthily propose the building of the Bank of Tirana — a path documented also by the very well-preserved sketches and projects.

The exhibition thus brings to the public the history of the Building in a journey among photographs, sketches and original drawings of the time, reflecting and naturally dialoguing also with the project of its restoration — a project by the architect Mario Petreschi, which brought the inauguration of the new complex on 30 October 2015, together with the Museum of the Bank of Albania. The exhibition clearly reflects the fact that the Building of the Bank of Albania, in the form we inherited from Morpurgo, will remain to history, but it will continue to live now as part of a new architectural and multifunctional complex.

The photographs of this exhibition are part of the fund of the National Bank of Albania and are kept at the Central Archive of the Italian State, in Rome. They were produced mainly by the photographers of the Foto Vasari studio, Rome, and the Italian engineers who worked on the buildings of the National Bank of Albania, during the years 1925–1938. The sketches and drawings are likewise part of the Fund of the Bank of Albania.