Arcò completes locally crafted, award-winning building in Albania

the façade facing the countryside

Bion-partner ARCò from Milan just completed another international cooperation that fruited an inspiring building in the Albanian town of Divjakës.

URBANLAB is conceived as a gateway between the city, the park and the rural landscape, a new landmark for the local community. An asymmetric alternation of double pitched roofs shapes a clearly modern architecture though evoking domestic spaces and recalling the comfortable image of archetypical rural buildings of the area.

According to the principles of short distance architecture, the Italian design team chose to enhance local building traditions though innovating its architectural language. The building is mainly made of exposed brick masonry. The façades design follows a process of addition and subtraction where the single brick is dissolved in the complexity of the whole. 

The façade towards the countryside has a more experimental character: a wooden grid hosts a freely assembled composition of windows and wattle-and-daub panels. The latter are made of giant reed canes woven to the wooden frame and covered with a mixture of clay, sand and straw. “We learned about this technique during one of the LearnBI0N workshops in 2017” states Alessio Battistella, leader of the design team. 

façade construction with wattle-and-daub panels.

The clay walls contribute to the building’s climatic concept by providing thermal inertia. A carefully chosen orientation with respect to solar gains and a proper ventilation design complete this way of providing comfort without mechanical devices.

The URBANLAB project has been awarded with the SACU Prize Camerino 2020 for architecture and urban culture.