TIRANA STELES
TIRANA STELES
2025
Tirana
Albania
The Tirana Steles represent the period of calm after the ancestral movements of the earth’s plates.
Albania is located in a privileged position in the geography of the movements of the Mediterranean’s land plates. Lying between the Eurasian, African, Aegean and Anatolian plates, it offers a territory kissed by the wealth of nature.
Architecture, which has always been erected as a symbol of power and prevarication, today finds redemption from these sins, to take on the role of a messenger of sharing between man and the natural environment.
The Tirana Steles represent a watershed between two distinct epochs of human endeavour on earth, namely a past epoch marked by necessity, and a present epoch marked by opportunities to be seized in order to embrace the future.
With this new symbol, man puts the question of our childhood back at the centre of the evolutionary scale and marks a moment of will in reconsidering our passage through time in positive terms.
The glazed part marks the horizontality of the underwater world of the Mediterranean Sea. We choose the ‘soft’ and translucent parts of the building to mark the transparency and vitality of the sea, and its geological stratifications. The vivid colours that the sea gives us emerge on the surface to testify to the richness of this geographic and climatic area: unique in the world. The tangible elements of the project are the synthesis of life.
The lightness of the stems in contact with the ground and their slender, skyward dimension give vigour to the minute environment of the urban fabric at the level of the pedestrian being projected upwards. This dual effect of the symbol with its minimal expression and its rough material, as well as a philosophical response to the smoothness of contemporary life, gives the citizen a sense of sensory priorities.
The Tirana Steles take the form of contemporary Menhirs, tapering upwards, but grounded to emphasise contemporary man’s ability to produce interventions marked by lightness and intelligence.
The stones chosen to clad the steles are those that attest to Albania’s geological strength, a sincere symbolic representation, physical, of Albania’s soil.
Ideally, the stratigraphy of what lies beneath is erected in its natural state in the sunlight, connecting earth and sky, the space that is the place of man’s life, and man’s will to live, stabilising the forces of nature, in this corner of earthly paradise.
In the same place we install an Ispace (spaces signifying the sensitive nature of human spatial perception) representing air and freedom, as a public space for the community, contributing to the efforts of the Albanian national administration in promoting a healthy sociality in the construction of the territory.
