The Masterplan project “Le Serre” consists of the design of a large portion of the city near the urban center of Tirana, consisting primarily of residential buildings with the ground floor reserved for retail shops and public facilities.

The Serre Masterplan has two aims: first, a recognizable identity that unifies the entire design, capable of joining the self-referential new community within the new urban texture. Second, the encouragement of singular buildings, protecting the individuality and the speciality of every single inhabitant.

The project uses the single block as the starting point of the design and following the directives of Tirana’s new master plan, which encourages an identifiable texture of city planning in the new urban fabric. The block scheme, deforms the block by slicing and horizontally moving the fragments within the block structure of the new city. A second level of articulation creates linear elements of varying dimensions and urban typological functions. The resulting scheme takes on the appearance of a bar-code, defined by a sequence of north-south oriented linear fragments (optimizing the solar exposure of the apartment), composing urban fronts along the main streets, while always maintaining a pedestrian permeability, both visually and physically.