Tirana Fountain Tower

Tirana Fountain Tower, also presented by the Albanian government as Tirana Fountain Plaza, is Bjarke Ingels Group's winning entry in an international competition for the edge of Rinia Park, the green heart of central Tirana, where it replaces the privately owned Taiwan (Taivani) restaurant and casino complex on Rruga Sami Frashëri. BIG lifts nearly the entire programme of apartments, a hotel, offices and cultural uses onto a forest of slender white columns, leaving the ground plane open as continuous parkland. The glazed upper volume is wrapped in stacked layers of perforated white disks whose density and depth shift parametrically with orientation, sun and use, giving the building the soft, billowing profile Bjarke Ingels describes as a cloud of homes hovering above the park. Two curved volumes clad in fluted glass anchor either end and carry the vertical circulation and public entrances. Roughly a tenth of the floor area is given to public and cultural space, including an open-access library, community rooms and a covered auditorium. Water is the organising idea: an inverted fountain falls from the underside of the elevated block as a summer rain into the gardens below, the existing Taiwan Pool is kept, and a closed-loop system captures, filters and reuses rainwater for irrigation and flood control. BIG beat Barozzi Veiga, Cobe, l'AUC and Julien De Smedt Architects for the commission.