GREEN VALLEY
GREEN VALLEY
2019 -
Tirana
Albania
The valley descends with its vegetation that embraces new living spaces. We have not designed buildings, but filters that welcome us as a precious asset, not detached from nature but in symbiosis with it. In the design we have let nature enter our homes and from our intimacy we are projected into the green valley as in a beautiful dream. Buildings disappear and we live in a generous park. We create this vision with a few simple elements, just as nature teaches us: it’s simple, simply magnificent, but all its beauty comes from a great complexity of reasons.
The urban layout of the new Green Valley district already gives us a sense of harmony. We define the boundaries built and lapped by arterial roads, to the north and east, with volumes that stand like bastions to protect the arrival of the green valley, marked by the oval shape. But at the same time this form opens up generating the most linear ramparts of the district boundary, so that the passage between the urban part and the park part takes place in a natural way.
The dimension of the internal roadway is calibrated to see fragments of the volumes built along its tangents. The perception of the built is reduced in favour of the perception of the green, giving strength to the feeling of experiencing more empty spaces than the built ones. Thanks to this geometry, parallelisms of the built parts are avoided and we continuously open visual cones that participate with the other design elements to make the experience of the inhabitants as pleasant as possible. The constructions are a sequence of blades partly driven into the ground and partly suspended. They are protective fragments seen from the outside but completely permeable from the inside to the outside, and follow the gentle slope without changing the natural morphology of the ground.
We use the shapes generated by the square and the cube because they are the shapes that give stability to man. We retrace the sense of gravity that binds us to the earth in primary forms, but at the same time we open up in all cardinal directions, offering the inhabitants a sense of protection on the one hand and of the continuity of the spaces on the other. The effect is that man never feels trapped in a space, but is always offered a way of escape.
The 37 villas are a set of 4 different types, placed in a unique position so that each one represents a new environment. There are 3 types of apartment buildings and in the same way as the villas they are designed not to repeat themselves, just as the types of the interiors of the apartments have different sizes and spaciousness ranging from 2 to 4.5 rooms. This variety is expressed in the overall view, giving the neighbourhood a heterogeneous and surprising atmosphere. The architecture and language chosen for the new image of the Green Valley district means that even the three level apartment buildings appear as houses or villas surrounded by greenery.
