A rooftop venue and café are accessible to the public as well. The sloping of the roof creates an amphitheatre-like space that is framed by a dramatic backdrop of the city itself. With open venues, one sheltered and one with a rooftop view, and traditionally hidden theatre spaces being revealed out towards the city the new National Theatre of Albania will be both stage and actor in the city of Tirana.
Rather than a single hermetic entity, BIG has dissolved the ESET Campus into an urban village of interconnected buildings, framing public paths and urban squares. The diverse cluster of individual pavilions is unified by the undulating solar roofs – forming a single silhouette rising from the forested park like a man-made addition to the Little Carpathians mountain range. The ESET Campus is expected to open in .
Located along Independence Avenue SW from th to th street, the roughly -acre site includes the Castle, the Arts and Industries Building, the Freer Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – all individually listed or eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places – and the mostly subterranean Quadrangle Building which is home to the National Museum of African Art, the Sackler Gallery of Art and the S. Dillon Ripley Center.
The Gammel Hellerup School just north of Copenhagen is a well-preserved piece of architecture and a good example of building on a human scale. BIG was asked to design two new buildings, a new multi-purpose hall and a new arts building for the growing school. The challenge was to develop a masterplan and architectural design for new buildings that met the school’s changing needs while still respecting the traditional architecture.
The food labs and offices are designed to offer maximum flexibility, with open classrooms, laboratories, and kitchens that can be rearranged for different purposes due to the generous height and width of the spaces. All kitchens and laboratories feature industrial materials for hygiene and maintenance, while public programs use natural materials such as wood and stone to create a welcoming atmosphere.