The 2017 football stadium in the northern Albanian city of Shkodra was a fast-track project – Albania had to host the ritual skirmish with Serbia. To marshal Riotous Serbian fans corral-like platforms were built – each restrains 500 fans within the heavy steel perimeter rail. These raked platforms were as naked concrete an illustration of Louis Kahn’s statement (that a buildings sculptural essence is only visible while under construction or as a ruin). The colours of the Shkodra team are a manly pink and light blue. Finished the pink reverse side of the stadium corrals offer a dramatic backdrop for informal urban life. The new main stadium with V.I.P. deck + press box is lit from up lights reflecting on white circles (see sketch). Existing stadiums were upgraded with a wind animated screen.

The proposal is based on two complementary strategic choices: the interpretation of the park as a green flow, made up of a great variety of landscapes within which there are clearings that welcome the various episodes of industrial archeology, and the redesign of the seafront in continuity up to the island of Nisida, making it possible to expand the space for the beach and the Porto Turistico.

LOCKED IN SERVITUDE THE DRAMA OF A BUILDING’S MAKING REMAINS HIDDEN: (Louis Kahn)

There is today an enormous potential in the re-scripting of grand industrial spaces, survivors from an epoch that had less trouble expressing itself and its mechanical or technical potency than our current mean and exploitative ‘global shopping-centre-culture’.

One thinks of São Paulo’s Fábrica da Pompéia by Lina Bo Bardi, London’s Tate Bankside, or the Zollverein Coal Mine in Essen, Germany.

This was our first reaction as our client drove his black Porsche into the rusting cathedral of Hannover’s ‘U-boat Hall’. Was it a panic reaction at the end of WW II to build a submarine production space so far from the North Sea? The structure of the hall had in fact been originally designed for a U-boat production site of a naval dockyard in Wilhelmshaven. As it turned out the enigmatically named ‘U-boat Hall’ was only finished in 1944 and was thus not used for armament production.

Now sliced like salami the ‘Industrial Heritage Structure’ is to house various commercial outlets – a mega Bicycle Emporium where racing bikes can be tested in the shop or this landscape of coloured furniture.

This is in fact two shops; RS (wholesome wood) and Yellow (sub-designer). BOLLES+WILSON have already realized their flagship store in Münster and the HQ Building, a rooftop lake above a ‘big box’ two-floor warehouse/distribution centre.

For the ‘U-boat Hall’ the rent was based on the square meters of the hall’s floor. The architectural question was how to maximize this floor area with a selling landscape and a back of house warehouse for customers to pick up their new sofa / table / lamp.

The magnificent scale of rusting columns, elevated crane track and skylight box, resist the invasion of domestic equipment, relegating it to the status of ‘a carpet of coloured pixels’ spread across the selling decks.

When is a warehouse a lake? – in Münster.

This is the third BOLLES+WILSON building for the German-wide furniture chain RS+Yellow, an extension of the homebase storage and distribution centre by 7,000 sqm. The new rectangular building volume stands adjacent to the original 1992 corrugated aluminium warehouse.

The 60 x 66 m two stores ‘Big-Box’ is (as is usual for industrial architecture) reduced to a regular grid of pre-cast columns and widespan floor slabs. Facades are a standard lightweight concrete system. Verticality is emphasised with pyjama colour stripes interspersed with zinc coated grid stripes. These absorb all windows and necessary smoke outlets into an uninterrupted colour curtain.

This warehouse and even perhaps the 1,500 sqm of offices above the delivery bays are precisely realised but relatively conventional. The big surprise comes on arriving at the rooftop meeting rooms and executive offices. Through the intervention of the fire brigade (choreographed alarm) the roof of the building has been flooded – a 45 x 65 m reflecting pool.

The edge detail, laser levelled into invisibility, increases the metaphysical unreality of this sky reflector. Underwater compartments eliviate the risk of mini-tsunamis. Spillage is collected in edge channels and channelled to an internal cistern.

A wooden boardwalk fronts the large format sliding glass facade. A pier extends out to the centre of the water world. Here one can sit surrounded by geometric groves of bamboo. From here the south facing glass front of the roof pavilion reflects again the rippling expanse of water. The facade itself is shaded by a projecting steel pergola and a curtain of louvers descending at the press of a button from its outer edge.

This choreographed overlap of inside and outside, of natural and artificial, of direct and reflected light, create a unique atmosphere which could be described as an industrial scaled Japanese Tea-House.