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Architectural Project:

Studio Archea Associati

​Structural Project:

Aei progetti Srl

Year:

2016

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VELIERA

Durazzo (Albania)

Structure of sails and columns

Studio Archea Associati

With the new seaside square, Durazzo conquers several thousand square meters of public space dedicated to social and collective life in one of the most beautiful and significant places in the city: the harbor front. What today is only a place of passage for cars crowded with traffic and the incessant flow of cars will soon become a space for walking, for leisure and meeting in an open but covered area. A large stone tent suspended on four points helps to symbolize the idea of ​​the community, creating shade and protection over a square below, which in turn covers the underpass of the road that is buried to eliminate car traffic. In the future, what today is only a traffic hub - the perpendicular meeting of two important urban arteries - will show itself as a natural stage for the city where people can stop, where shows and events can be organized and where the long axis that leads from the town square to the sea is consolidated and concluded. The force of the wind and the waves metaphorically lifts a stone ground and, like a sail anchored to four masts of as many imaginary boats, flies over the city, stretching it towards the water. When the palm-lined avenue is closed to traffic, people will be able to reach the seafront from the city center without crossing driveways; they will see the new covered square as the backdrop to a new and evocative urban scenario while waiting for the port to open up to citizens in the future, as has happened in other Mediterranean cities, from Genoa to Barcelona. The large stone curtain (which is suspended over the square at a height ranging from 4 to 18 meters and is 30 cm to 4 meters thick) also aims to become an icon and image of the new Durazzo that projects itself into the world through the construction of a new symbol that exalts the meaning of welcome, hospitality, and the sea. Technically, it is a bold and complex work because the tent measures about sixty meters in length and forty meters in width and rests only on four vertex points consisting of four stainless steel masts stabilized, like the masts of a sailboat, by four cables that recall, in fact, the shrouds used in boats. Similarly to the extroflexion of the tent-covering, the ground of the square also curves in order to reduce the excavation of the underpass and compress the space of the square up to the central hole. The latter not only constitutes the drainage system for the water from the covering in case of rain, but also represents a sort of eye that projects the sunlight reproducing on the marble floor, as in the Pantheon, the power of light and therefore of the natural elements.

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