JA Joubert Architecture designs towers "echoing the hills and mountains" in Tirana

Dutch studio JA Joubert Architecture has completed a series of undulating, mixed-use towers on a lakeside site in Tirana, Albania.

Nestled beside the city's Tirana Park Lake, the 135,000-square-metre Lake Views development is spread across two sites containing 1,150 residences as well as public and commercial programmes.

Rotterdam-based JA Joubert Architecture designed the complex with an undulating form intended to "slope and fold into the terrain" and limit the use of "repetitive blocks".

To both draw in light and offer views across the surrounding landscape, the mixed-use towers are each lined with cascading planted terraces designed to mimic the nearby mountains.

"By creating this undulating height and positioning the facing facades carefully, we could have views from and through the project, creating a more democratic neighbourhood with its own identity," studio founder Marc Joubert told Dezeen.

"The full-width terraces with planters for the end apartments create a green view, echoing the green hills and mountains surrounding Tirana," he added.

A modular grid determined the layout of the towers, which are complete with glazed facades flanked with protruding terraces.

At ground level, JA Joubert Architecture designed the site with a "pedestrian-friendly" courtyard, where greenery-lined paths connect the towers' lower commercial levels.

On the larger of the two sites, four towers rise from a sinuous three-floored volume containing commercial space.

Above this, the apartments rise in a staggered form, while a three-storey parking lot is held underground.

The second, smaller site contains a single S-shaped tower fitted with one commercial floor at ground level, which is similarly enclosed by green spaces.

"By twisting the buildings, we could create calm and quiet public and green spaces on the ground floor available to all the citizens of Tirana," Joubert said.

The Lake Views complex is the latest addition to Tirana's evolving built environment, which has seen a boom in playful projects by international architecture studios.

According to JA Joubert Architecture, Lake Views reflects a broader architectural ambition in Albania that "goes beyond form-making to address resilience, liveability, and the quality of shared urban space".

Other projects recently completed in the Albanian capital include a veterinary hospital formed of sculptural concrete walls and a pair of kinked skyscrapers designed to evoke "the grace of ballet".

The photography is by Leonit Ibrahimi.

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