ArkiCompetition: OBSERVATORY HOUSES-BKMS Team

The Past transpiring in the Present

Competition: OBSERVATORY HOUSES / Young Architects Competitions/ April-July 2017

Team: Besim Krosa, Qëndrim Begisholli, Leart Miftari, Arnisa Kryeziu, Arbër Sadiki

Prize: Finalists

From the competition brief: “…Italian Exhibition Group and the Italian government launched the Observatory Houses project aiming to find a new use for Roccascalegna taking advantage of the potential of an oneiric setting with remarkable skies. The project aims at creating in Italy the first and most suggestive observatory houses. They will be a sustainable and exclusive house model aimed to ensure the protection and improvement of such inestimable heritage.”

From the authors:

The challenge of this project was to preserve and increase the existing values of the architecture and city of Roccascalegna, therefore the entire project was conceptualized around the idea of serving to these two important potentials of the area. The program of the observatory houses, similarly as the urban structure of the village, is spread in grid, elevated from the ground, to protect the existing vegetation and not disturb the wildlife existing on the hill, below the fortress.

Interventions in chronological order and masterplan

The grid is a light, modular structure which does not require excavations of the ground, fulfilling the most important ethic of intervention in architectural heritage- reversibility of interventions.

Section

The new intervention stays quiet without interfering with resonance of the fortress as a non- invasive approach, but in contrary it complies with its history and story. The new architectural intervention will increase values of the fortress and the village in general, and will accelerate the tourism offering an inexperienced journey through legends and history of the village while creating “a story composed by stars, silences and landscapes”.