Tall & Urban News

A design for a new mixed-use building has been released by Mario Cucinella Architects (MCA). The proposed Ekspozita Building (Albanian for “Exhibition”) will rise 93 meters and serve as a statement building in the center of Tirana. It will comprise commercial, residential, and public amenity spaces, and its unusual form will allow it to partially encircle a generous new green space. Such an amenity is particularly valuable in the busy capital where open areas are few and far between.

Generous planting to the residential upper floors will enhance the sense of a green oasis, while the inward-facing balconies will give a feeling of enclosure and protection from the busy city. Cutting off angles on the corners of its rectangular plot will create yet more public spaces. The building will occupy three and a half sides of a square footprint, opening its courtyard up to the south, onto the tree-lined Blv Gergi Fishta, one of Tirana’s major roads.

The building will rise to a maximum of 24 stories, with peaks that refer to the nearby Mount Dajti and other Balkan Mountains. The result of its unusual geometry is that the ground floor of the building, plus another much smaller two-story building which will be used as a nursery/kindergarten, occupies only 44 percent of the plot.

As the building rises upwards, it withdraws back into itself, creating the smaller footprints that are most suitable for residential use. A “notch” in the rear of the building will provide a diagonal route through, dividing the two sides of commercial development on the ground floor and offering permeability to the site.

The design of the building pays close attention to the climate of Tirana, which is defined as “humid temperate,” with summers peaking at 30°C (86°F). The Ekspozita Building will be highly insulated, with the intention that it will need no heating or cooling in the two shoulder seasons. There will also be close attention paid to solar shading, in order to minimize heat gain in the generously glazed building during the summer. Large terraces to the apartments will act as passive solar regulators. The design team calculated that these strategies will mean that the building uses 30 percent less energy than other, comparable developments.

The on-site construction is planned to start later in 2020 and finish in 2023.

For more on this story, go to Mario Cucinella Architects.