Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, has collaborated with Porto-based firm OODA to propose the Oricon Tower, a striking 50-story landmark for Tirana, Albania's capital city. The ambitious project represents a significant addition to the city's evolving skyline and serves as a dramatic gateway to the Albanian capital.
The tower is strategically positioned at a crucial urban threshold, standing between Tirana's historic city grid and its rapidly expanding western edge where infrastructure, housing, and commercial development converge. This location underscores the building's role as both an architectural statement and an urban connector. The collaboration brings together Souto de Moura's disciplined, award-winning approach to architectural form with OODA's contemporary emphasis on adaptability and dynamic urban engagement.
Situated beside the existing Bond Tower, the Oricon Tower establishes a thoughtful dialogue with its urban surroundings through carefully calibrated massing and deliberate design treatment at street level. The lower floors create a porous interface with the street, featuring glazed facades and deep recesses that modulate light and clearly define entry thresholds. This ground-level design gives way to a sophisticated vertical composition where repetition, shadow play, and reflection create measured continuity across the building's facade.
The tower's placement along the primary axis connecting Tirana's airport to the city center emphasizes its function as an urban threshold and arrival marker. Rather than presenting a uniform appearance to all sides, the building intelligently modulates its architectural expression according to orientation – appearing more solid and substantial when viewed from the airport approach, while becoming more permeable and transparent toward the inner city. This design strategy allows the structure to effectively mediate between the experience of movement and arrival.
The architectural identity of the Oricon Tower emerges from its thoughtful material construction, with concrete, marble, and glass handled with characteristic restraint that emphasizes continuity and texture over superficial surface effects. These carefully selected materials reference regional building traditions while supporting the tower's structural clarity through vertical load-bearing elements that frame broad spans, opening interior spaces to abundant natural light and expansive views of the surrounding landscape.
Detailing throughout the building serves specific architectural purposes. Marble panels articulate the tower's middle section, lending visual weight and a sense of permanence to the structure, while lighter glazing at the upper levels enhances transparency and luminosity specifically for the hotel floors. The building's structural system, refined through close coordination between the architects and engineering teams, successfully balances expressive simplicity with technical rigor, ensuring structural stability without unnecessary excess.
The functional organization of the Oricon Tower mirrors the layered activity of the city itself, with a clear vertical gradient of uses. Retail shops and office spaces occupy the base levels, giving the ground plane a strong civic presence and extending the commercial energy of Dritan Hoxha Avenue into the building. Mid-level apartments are efficiently arranged around the central core, with layouts that prioritize both privacy for residents and optimal views toward the surrounding mountains.
The upper levels house a hotel and restaurant that crown the building, where the spatial character shifts dramatically from compressed circulation spaces to generous open volumes. In these upper floors, natural daylight and panoramic views define the atmospheric experience. Circulation throughout the building remains direct and efficient – an aspect integral to Souto de Moura's architectural practice – and is supported by a central core that links separate lobbies designed specifically for residential, commercial, and hospitality uses.
The design philosophy of the Oricon Tower rests fundamentally on the principle that architecture and construction are inseparable elements of successful design. Each design decision, from facade modulation to structural span calculations, reflects the underlying logic of how the building stands and functions within its urban environment. The collaboration between Eduardo Souto de Moura and OODA successfully synthesizes decades of architectural experience with contemporary experimentation, resulting in a coherent architectural statement that promises to become a defining feature of Tirana's evolving urban landscape.
