Leo’s Gate is the fourth building block on the site of the former ice rink in Münster. It marks the entrance to the Science Quarter from Steinfurter Strasse. The mixed use with catering units on the ground floor, flexible Coworking Spaces and Coliving Modules on the upper floors is multifunctional.

Different wooden constructions are planned depending on use and requirements. Floor-to-ceiling timber trusses with light ribbed ceiling slabs are used in the cantilevered Coworking areas. The 45 residential units are delivered as completely prefabricated and furnished wooden modules and are stacked over four floors.

All facade elements are designed in a uniform shade of red, which blends in with the entire ensemble of the historical Leonardo campus and the new brick buildings in the area.

Finished in late 2020 Frobenstraße 1 offers for renting 11 variously sized apartments and 2 commercial units in an area of fashionable shops and galleries (Potsdamer Straße), street prostitution, social housing and huge investor driven developments of owner occupied apartments.

Frobenstraße 1 is a chorus member. It is not a Primadonna that steps out to front stage. The choreography of urban choruses is the Großstadt-DNA of Berlin, Paris or Barcelona. It defines the street line and the eaves line. In Frobenstraße 1 the upper facade limit is articulated with a recessed shadow line, a modest but significant detail.

The well behaved chorus anticipates a fictive future block-perimeter conclusion to the south, where there is now a Kindergarten with luxurious trees. Here the pink side wall (fire wall) presents itself for the kids with its giant footprint graphic.

Unlike the Bel étage of a Paris House the first floor here has the standard 3,10 m room height, but its special relation to the street is prescribed by the delicate and continuous railing.

The window composition to the street describes the internal layout where three apartments break out of the standard, but generous room height to 4,80 m and 6,50 m. The grey facade has therefore aspirations to be read as a palazzo, with the projecting penthouse window playing the classic attica.

The garden facade is more domestic, balconies meandering out for afternoon sun and individual planting.

For the interior communal stair and lift black and white tiles dignify homecoming.

‘A staging of shopping’. The widespan shop outlet typology usually situated on the periphery is here reconstituted as an urban facade, city near and addressing the city bound / city exiting traffic. Three stores (RS, Yellow, Brands) with an overall shop area of 5.000 m2 cluster with warehouse and delivery bays, around an internal parking piazza. An advertising tower erupts on one corner, a supersign, a new actor in the quartier’s tower landscape (Trinity Church and Fire Station Tower).

A theatrically proportioned roof frames the pedestrian/car entrance. This transition space is a constructed perspective (rejecting any ideal viewing point), a reciprocal scenographic framing of inner and outer world. The hovering roof grows out of and connects the two larger shops. Logistics are critical – 18 m long lorries cross the piazza and disappear into the building.

The exaggerated scale of the wooden window frames in RS (which sells wooden furniture) are stacked like boxes (These 35 cm wide frames sidestep a local building regulation that prohibits wooden facades on retail structures). A dialogue between contained and container that continues in the interior detailing. Both structure (prefabricated concrete) and the materiality (fibre-cement panels) of the facades respond with an economic and systemized appropriateness to the ‘outlet’ building type.

1) The conversion of the communist library on Bulevard Shën Gjergji was a parallel project to the construction of the (BOLLES+WILSON) New Library facing the new Cathedral Square. – These are all pieces of the puzzle that adds up to the BOLLES+WILSON Masterplan for the centre of the city of Korça.

2) The re-design introduced a new balcony to synthesise a previously uncomfortable Junction of marble columns and the white box upper floor. The perforated balustrade facilitates victorious football teams or the mayor addressing his public.

3) The four large windows to the balcony received new sliding sun screens. We are here only a stone’s throw from the BOLLES+WILSON 2014 Red Bar in the Sky.

4) The communist library was on the site of a demolished church – the façade geometry of this absent building had already been embossed into the paving (rotated on its ground line) with the pedestrianizing of Boulevard Shën Gjergji (BOLLES+WILSON Masterplan stage 1). This embedded history is now to be read in lasered text in Albanian (black on white) or English (white on black) on the new entrance ramp wall (the axis of rotation for the reanimated church geometry).

5) The old library interior is emptied for a spacious ‘one stop shop’ (public information). Here existing tiles and the wide span coffered ceilings are thematized (colour + integrated air outlets), the existing theatrical stairs gets a pink backdrop with scattered windows. (6+7)

6) Here existing tiles and the wide span coffered ceilings are thematized (colour + integrated air outlets).

7) The existing theatrical stairs gets a pink backdrop with scattered windows.

8) Part of the entrance level floor was removed for a stair that leads down to the new council chamber.

9) White public information islands are divided from individual offices by a lightweight glass wall.

10) Dividing – the council chamber from the Lobby. A translucent screen of green wine bottles was inserted between existing structural beams.

11) The floor slab removed for the council chamber creates a grand salon for political debate. Councillors desks are white, the visitors balcony pink (12+13)

14) Wine bottles set in mortar give an underwater ambience to council chamber.

15) Their open necks function as acoustic absorbers.

16) Councillors’ benches focus on the mayor’s desk, this is backed by a wooden screen with the double eagle Albanian national symbol.

17) Our client, the mayor Sotiraq Filo

18) A high clearstory window lights from the side

19) Next door to the new city hall an existing building (nineteenth century eclecticism) has been carefully restored for the offices of the mayor and his staff. It connects directly to the council chamber via a submerged tunnel (steps above). (19)

20) Within the mayors building – no architectural interventions were needed. It only remained for BOLLES+WILSON to apply a radical polychromy. (20,21,22,23)