NEW HIT – Hotel International Tirana

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Hotel

COUNTRY: Albania

CITY: Tirana

YEAR: 2016-2025

ARCHITECTS: BOLLES+WILSON with Atelier 4

PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON

New HIT was the working title of this project for the Albanian investor Mr. Ram Geci – it has now been franchised to the INTERCONTINENTAL hotel chain.

THINNESS – The gold New HIT façade terminates Tirana’s central axis, the result of a 1930s regulatory plan by Geheraldo Bossio and Fernando Poggi (Italian occupation).

THINNESS – The hotel is adjacent to the grand and elegant 2017 Scanderbeg Square by the Belgians 51N4E.

THINNESS – in the east and west elevations the hotel is read as two thin slabs - black to the north and gold to the south.

LAYERING – the black slab backs the gold façade, in front of this stands the white Hotel Tirana (the tallest building in Albania under Communism). To the left is the Albanian National Museum (a gift from Russia). To the right even MDRDV’s Skanderbeg (national hero) glances sideways wishing he also could be golden.

EVOLUTION - First sketches engendering the 2 slab sandwich concept.

EVOLUTION - Inverted `V´ windows originally occupied the south façade.

EVOLUTION - These at night became a woven golden curtain.

EVOLUTION - Inverted `V´ windows with projecting cowl (sun screening)

EVOLUTION - Illuminated gold curtain - with double windows.

EVOLUTION - Windows taking in two hotel rooms are marshalled into rectangular cassettes.

EVOLUTION - WINDOW DECLINATION - Like Lucretian Clinamen the windows are in flux, swerving out of alignment with the gold façade which each illuminates with its concealed LED strip (left hand window surround).

EVOLUTION - Window details - the central coloured panels screen ventilation slits to two hotel rooms.

EVOLUTION - Ordered windows -Tirana jumble - grand mountains.

LOST IN TRANSLATION - An eight year evolution from initial concept to grand physical object is an act of translation. It is thus inevitable that certain generative ideas are lost in translation.

LOST IN TRANSLATION - The Hotel Lobby Sketch was instrumental in getting the Prime Minister’s approval, it survived much of the journey but not the appearance of an Italian interior designer who arrived when the 5 Star hotel was franchised to the INTERCONTINENTAL chain.

LOST IN TRANSLATION - This was also the fate of the BOLLES+WILSON conference hall, also the initial room gestalt.

Another Lost in Translation victim was rooftop terraces - too windy 100m up.

LOST IN TRANSLATION - The late arrival of a Casino almost engendered a gold and red staircase balanced over car park ramps.

LOST IN TRANSLATION - As Louis Kahn once noted – the drama of a building’s making is lost when complete. For the New HIT tower construction (as always) first went dramatically downwards.

When finished a tower becomes a family member in an emerging URBAN COLLAGE. From left to right – BOLLES +WILSON, MDRDV, CEBRA, Alejandro Aravena (Elemental), BOLLES+WILSON’s under construction Bazaar Gate (in the backseat).

Suzuki House

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Residential

COUNTRY: Japan

CITY: Tokyo

YEAR: 1993

CLIENT: Akira Suzuki

AWARD: Goldmedal from Japanese Architects Institute 1994

PHOTOS: © Ryuji Miyamoto

A house as a large family room suspended in the city.

A house with a child’s room suspended within.

A house with two legs and a usable roof.

A house glanced by a passing Ninja (Impressed Shadow Façade).

suzuki house_japan_ryuji miyamoto_street view by night

Street view at night

suzuki house_japan_ryuji miyamoto_street view by day

Street view at day

Sketch

Interior

Internal organisation sketches

Ground floor

First floor

Second floor

Passing Ninja

Kitchen and dining room

Polychromink / Coin Tower Tirana

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Office, shopping, gastronomy

COUNTRY: Albania

CITY: Tirana

YEAR: 2008

ARCHITECTS: BOLLES+WILSON with Studio Comi

PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON, © Ernest Ferizi

What is now known as the COIN Tower originally had the working title Polychromic Tower during planning. It was completed in 2008, in the final years of then-mayor Edi Rama’s façade-coloring program, which aimed to give a new face to the grey, post-communist city. BOLLES+WILSON were asked by the mayor to find an acceptable façade design for the already-under-construction tower. It was built without a crane, with concrete carried up on the workers’ backs. It features a Coat of Many Colours of sun louvers wrapping its somewhat irregular silhouette – unfortunately, only half of these arrived from the Turkish supplier. As the first post-communist tower, it soon became Tirana’s hub of luxury shopping.

RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Warehouse, Villa

COUNTRY: German

CITY: Münster

YEAR: 1993

GFA: 5.810 sqm

CLIENT: Rainer Scholze

The 1990-93 shiny aluminum shed was the first of three big-box warehouse buildings built successively side by side to store and distribute furniture for the ever-expanding chain of RS + Yellow Shops. As well as this home base BOLLES+WILSON built for the same company shops/outlets in Münster, Hannover, Munich and Berlin.

The dimensions and form of the 1993 RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1 were prescribed by the ruins of a half-built industrial structure. The problem was to economically clad this given form.

The skin of corrugated aluminum has been seen as a reference to Australian wool sheds, a typology here projected to a length of 120 m. It landed like a UFO in its fragmented peripheral context. At the time B+W were propagating such large self-evident forms (see Technologyhof Münster 1993) to anchor and give scale to the fragmentation of ubiquitous post-industrial Eurolandschaft Fields.

The critical detail for RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1 was the façade section, two intersecting plates of shiny metal. Avoiding a capping plate as well as regular downpipes, that would compromise such a pure extended surface, runoff water from the barrel-vaulted roof courses down the inside surface of the upper façade panel to be delivered in turn by the lower façade panel into a pebble drain at ground level.

The rear end of this super-shed housed the office of the company owner, this subsequently moved to the spectacular Waterscape rooftop of RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 2 built directly beside RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1. A third adjacent big-box was to be capped by the client’s rooftop villa (RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 3) but his tragic death meant that it was completed as meeting rooms, standing in another infinity pool.

The 120 m façades give measure to its context.

New poplar trees, planted by the client, accompanied RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1 and also RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 3.

Facade Section: Rainwater flows down behind the upper corrugated aluminium sheet and is fed by the lower aluminium sheet into the pebble drainage.

Office and delivery bays at the rear end.

The office entrance punctures the sail-like façade. Entry buzzers have an umbrella-like canopy.

Interior storage racks

office space

Blackburn House

Detail

TYPOLOGY: Residential

COUNTRY: UK

CITY: London

YEAR: 1987

No grand statement rather a series of practical opportunities. First the restructuring of the row of rundown Mews Houses into a new white box. A large window breaks through the white façade, the view is not good, the glass is opaque, blinded.

Ground floor office, a two floor apartment housing, a collection; Barry Flanagan (hare), Scott Burton (chair), Andy Warhol (portrait), Bruce McLean (table), Ron Arad (table), Jasper Morrison (sofa). Interior details are added to this list – supporting column and cantilevered balcony in steel, a vitrine, a floating boat – seat – handrail – individual narratives in a limited range of materials.

The upper floor with its 14 m skylight-wall functions as gallery, the lower lobby as chair hall. Sitting on the central barge seat the visitor has reached the vortex of the composition hovering like the house itself, not quite part of London.