EKSPOZITA BUILDING

Maria Antonietta Santangelo

In the center of Tirana, Mario Cucinella Architects has designed a new iconic building that includes private residential spaces and public commercial spaces. Construction of the Ekzposita Building will be completed in 2023.
The design’s complexity entails a site plan following a broken line that doesn’t overrun the project site, allowing the surrounding green areas to keep substantial spatiality. The architecture’s geometric, composite form is its essential trait, rendering it a monument to the Balkan mountains, imitating their contour and rising to 93 meters high.
Open towards the urban landscape, the composition features a large internal hollow space, a green oasis that follows the tower’s 24 terraced floors. The building volume’s diagonal development, based on sustainability and energy efficiency needs, was conceived functionally to ensure the correct exposure of each room and the best natural lighting for any time of year, regulated passively through the large green terraces. Without equal sides, the Ekzposita Building has a facade punctuated by opaque, transparent modules in a system of alternating sequences, which form a dialogue with the dynamic urban setting and lighten the verticality of the built object. The building skin, its volume, and the design of its green space strive to create a comfortable, majestic architecture, recognizably a future urban landmark.