Sometimes, symbols are simple. A vainglorious monument is built to commemorate a dictator, an opulent extravagance in a country where bread is rationed, whose people can barely eat. The regime is then overthrown, and after considerable struggles democracy is established. Citizens feel free to appropriate and, none too respectfully, adapt his legacy, until at last an architect is appointed to give permanent form to this popular takeover. Menace becomes playfulness, the closed becomes open, the grandiose informal, the grey polychrome. This is the story of the Pyramid of Tirana, a 21 metre-high (70ft) concrete cone in Albania’s capital that opened...