Most fountains shoot water up. This one drops it on your head.
BIG just won the competition for Tirana Fountain Plaza, a new building in Albania’s capital that floats above Rinia Park on thin white columns.
Apartments, offices, a hotel and cultural spaces all live up top. The park stays down below, open to everyone.
And it really does look like a cloud. The glass walls are covered in rows of little perforated white disks, which soften every edge and make the whole thing look puffy. Two curved glass towers at either end are the only spots where it touches the ground.
A cloud with a job
Bjarke Ingels has a nice way of putting it.
A cloud of homes hovering above the park.
Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG
Fair enough. Clouds make shade, and so will this, turning the plaza underneath into a cool spot on hot days. BIG says lifting the building up actually gives the city more park than it has now.
Now the fun part. Instead of a jet rising from a basin, water falls from the bottom of the building, like a summer shower or a soft autumn drizzle. You could step out of the sun and walk straight through the rain on purpose! We’d go out of our way for that.
The water isn’t just for show, either. BIG plans to keep the existing Taiwan Pool and run everything on a closed loop, catching rain, storing it and using it to water new gardens, cool the park and help with flooding.
The project at a glance
A building that rains on a park
- ArchitectBIG, Bjarke Ingels Group
- WhereRinia Park, Tirana
- InsideHomes, offices, a hotel and a library
- SignatureA fountain that falls from the sky
- StatusCompetition winner. No timeline announced yet
A city that says yes
Tirana is a good city for this kind of idea. It once painted its gray apartment blocks in bright stripes. MVRDV turned the old Pyramid of Tirana into a cultural hub you can climb. Lately we’ve watched a striking red skyscraper, a tower with a shoulder to lean on and a ballroom that looks like a visiting spacecraft join the skyline.
BIG is already building the city’s bow-tie National Theatre, though tearing down the original 1930s building drew protests and arrests in 2020.
A couple of open questions remain. The new building would stand where the Taiwan Center restaurant complex is today, and it’s not clear yet what happens to it. There’s no timeline either.
For now it’s a winning design and some very dreamy renders. We already know where we’d stand. Right at the edge of the shade, waiting for the rain.
Images by BIG and Engram Studio.
