Taulantia Promenade
At Bread&Heart Festival
Taulantia Promenade
Earlier this month the Bread&Heart Festival returned to Tirana for a second year, gathering together hundreds of architects, landscape architects, planners, and cultural practitioners working in Albania. Among these approximately 200 international offices, the Taller presented one of its projects currently under construction in Durrës, as part of an exhibition of architectural models complimented by talks, book launches and other programmed events.
The Taulantia Promenade is a two-hundred-metre sequence of large porticos running along the Adriatic coast. It can be seen as a meeting point between the sea and city as well as a place for walking and finding shade.
The geometry of the porticos is drawn around the semi-circle. The arched forms rationalise the classical portico, simplifying, modulating, and casting it in concrete in part to withstand the weather conditions of the coastal environment: wind, salt, sea spray.
The repetition of the arches creates the illusion of a barrel vault. This guides the eye down through the promenade or gives the appearance of a continuous facade when viewed from either side. There is also visual continuity between the structure’s blue pigment and the tone of the sea, and in the interplay of light and shadow from both the roof and surrounding vegetation.
At three intervals, the porticos reduce in size to subtly demarcate information stations, where printed panels narrate the architectural and cultural history of the promenade and the city.
The book “The Albanian Files: Freedom and Architecture" edited by Anneke Abhelakh and published by Lars Müller launched during the festival.
It collates projects by, and interviews with sixty international architectural practices working across Albania – the Taller being one of them – to explore what it means to build in a country shaped by profound architectural development.
