“Naim Frashëri” School

For Metropolis, architecture is a continuous process of inquiry in which the city, the landscape, and society are understood as interconnected components of a single spatial system. Based in Tirana and active throughout the Balkan and Mediterranean regions, the practice operates as an open laboratory of ideas where architecture, urbanism, and academic research converge. This multidisciplinary approach, enriched through collaboration between practitioners and researchers, enables the studio to develop projects that address the complexity of territory with contextual sensitivity, conceptual clarity, and a long-term vision. Endrit Marku is a member of the practice, contributing as both an architect and an academic professor with extensive experience across multiple scales of the design process. He is also widely recognised as an artist whose work transforms urban landscapes into laboratories of visual reflection. The Naim Frashëri School is located within a neighbourhood of Durrës developed prior to the 1990s. The project is founded upon the concept of the boundary as the primary organising element of urban space. Rather than functioning as an isolated object, the building is conceived as a linear architectural element that mediates between the city and the neighbourhood, between the stadium square and the surrounding residential blocks, and between open public spaces and the existing urban density. In doing so, it reinforces the continuity of the urban fabric while establishing a renewed identity for its immediate context.