Rationalist Apartments
TYPOLOGY: Residential
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Tirana
YEAR: 2009
An eight floor building axially adjacent to the University ensemble – the axial focus of Tirana’s 1930’s Italian Masterplan.
Mass is emphasized, balconies internalized as loggias. Materials are reduced to those fitting historical precedent and the current possibilities of construction in Tirana. The particular ‘haptic’ of the base is achieved with wide mortar joints and intentionally irregular layers of broken (reject) tile fragments.
Polychromink / Coin Tower Tirana
TYPOLOGY: Office, shopping, gastronomy
COUNTRY: Albania
CITY: Tirana
YEAR: 2008
ARCHITECTS: BOLLES+WILSON with Studio Comi
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON, © Ernest Ferizi
What is now known as the COIN Tower originally had the working title Polychromic Tower during planning. It was completed in 2008, in the final years of then-mayor Edi Rama’s façade-coloring program, which aimed to give a new face to the grey, post-communist city. BOLLES+WILSON were asked by the mayor to find an acceptable façade design for the already-under-construction tower. It was built without a crane, with concrete carried up on the workers’ backs. It features a Coat of Many Colours of sun louvers wrapping its somewhat irregular silhouette – unfortunately, only half of these arrived from the Turkish supplier. As the first post-communist tower, it soon became Tirana’s hub of luxury shopping.
Housing at St. Sebastian
TYPOLOGY: Residential
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2016
COMPETITION: 2009, 1st prize
GFA: 8.180 sqm
CLIENT: Wohn + Stadtbau GmbH
AWARDS: “Exemplary publicly funded residential projects” – North Rhine-Westphalia Regional Prize for Architecture,
Housing and Urban Development 2017
BDA Münster-Münsterland award for best buildings 2017,
honorable mention
PHOTOS: © Roman Mensing, BOLLES+WILSON
In 2009 BOLLES+WILSON won the 1st prize for housing and a kindergarten on the site of the 1960ies St Sebastian Church. It was expected that the emblematic oval form of the church be demolished. Instead the kindergarten colonized the nave. It was opened in 2013 – a much published reuse with interior green weather protected play decks.
2015 phase 2 was complete, a peripheral frame of housing protecting the kindergarten from a noisy street and giving a precise edge to the adjacent park.
Market realities are clearly visible in the differentiation of the social (subsidized) housing with its bright white and pink plaster facade to Hammer Str. and the owner-occupied flats with their noble dark brick facade facing the mature trees in the park.
One corner tree is explicitly embraced by the projecting white sheet of the street facade.
Only kitchen and bathroom windows are allowed to receive traffic noise; living rooms and balconies turn inwards to the quiet green space surrounding the kindergarten.
Unexpected colour animates the lift and stair tower and the setback roof apartments. This polychrome trope also animates the skyline of the park elevation. Here big white frames give a grand order, a vertical hierarchy. But ultimately it is the grandeur of the existing trees that claim the status of leading actors in the spatial choreography.
Prison Library
TYPOLOGY: Library
COUNTRY: German
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 2005
GFA: 80 sqm
CLIENT: Justizvollzugsanstalt Münster
AWARDS: Library of the Year Prize (German Library Association + the ZEIT Foundation)
PHOTOS: © BOLLES+WILSON
In 2007 the German Library Association together with the ZEIT Foundation awarded the ‚Library of the Year Prize‘ to the small but significant Prison Library in Münster (concept BOLLES+WILSON, implementation prisoners). The jury praised the exemplary, user-friendly and new interpretation of library functions and the atmosphere, an estranged relative of the nearby City Library (BOLLES+WILSON 1987–93). The single library room, jammed in the ‚armpit‘ between two Panopticon wings is simply furnished with shelves and counters in ‚optimistic‘ wood and friendly colours. Facing mirrors above and adjacent to the shelves multiply the original triangular room into a kaleidoscopic virtual hexagon. The prison in its entirety is optically reduced to a small central pavilion. Reading as transcendence or Borges‘ infinite ‚Library of Babel‘ are the unavoidable message. A leaf motive on ceiling and walls, like the new furniture, is the handwork of the prisoners themselves.
Himmelsscheibe Exhibition Centre
TYPOLOGY: Cultural
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Nebra
YEAR: 2004
COMPETITION: Invited competition
AWARDS: Special price
An observation Tower connects an archaeological dig to its wider landscape. Nearby the Corten clad visitors centre with its cargo of sky disk (4,000 years old sky map) paraphernalia wriggles a few metres above rolling fields casting at its extremity a laconic glance skywards.
