Greencoast

Greencoast is a hotel development situated at the articulation between the Ionian Sea and the Llogara mountain pass at the northern side of the Albanian Riviera. 

The site is located at the very front of a retaining wall facing a white pebble beach. Created for the purpose of the development of a luxury housing estate this artificial topography has strongly altered the formerly preserved natural area. This unique situation gives the project a high responsibility in the urbanisation process of the Albanian coast and country’s longing for tourist oriented economy. Fully embracing the paradoxical ambition to reconstruct the landscape through an architecture able to organise a 110 room commodity, the project takes its origin both in the formal and narrative potential of abandoned quarries, man made landscapes and the conditions of meditterranean coastal architecture.
The architecture is organised as an articulated composition of 4 specific sequences (Malaparte, Capri Wall I, Pallazzo and Capri Wall II) recessed from the retaining wall creating both a strong relation towards the sea scape and an intimate promenade in a shadowed canyon. A quarry like organisation called the Capri Wall offers different private and public conditions, both interior and exterior, refering to the qualities of topographical architecture of the famous island. The Malaparte and the Pallazzo sequences emerge from the fragmented architectural landscape as straightforward forms of collectivity. Assumed as a future heritage of the Albanian coast, the overall organisation of the spaces and their functions escape to the classical centralised and systematic hotel logic. The constructive system and functional layout is thought through its potential of evolution and adaptation to future changes. Imagined as a potential sea side village, all the rooms have their own adress, are accessible from the outside and can be easily coupled and reorganised in bigger apartments or different configurations. Sometimes porcelain like, sometimes mat, the fragmented aspect of the building changes radically under the strong variations of the meditterranean sunlight. The rich and fragile vegetation growing on the mountain rocks of the Llogara is carefully selected and implemented on the site litterally taking over the mineral man made landscape, foreshadowing the potential ruin aspect of the site.