Barcelona Tower
Tirana

Any addition to Tirana’s burgeoning skyline calls for a simple and elegant concept. This is especially true of the architecture being built around Skanderbeg Square, the city’s main plaza and cultural heart, where projects must make a bold contribution to the site without confusing its historical identity.

Barcelona Tower will serve as a modern landmark, rising 190 metres into spectacular view with a single “twisting” motion. The twist is both a graceful and pragmatic form: it makes for a more energy-efficient and aerodynamic building envelope (with higher resistance to wind loads) and combines with a central concrete core to support the overall structure.

To create the twist, floor plates rotate around the core by a consistent number of degrees as they ascend and taper off towards the sky – a kind of obelisk – accommodating first offices and then a majority of apartments. The form is set into a chunky “plinth” containing commercial space at ground level, which works together with the rich red of the concrete pigment to demarcate this architectural world from the city beyond it.