Tirana New Bazaar

The Bazaar represented one of Tirana’s most iconic symbols of traditional urban life. The area housed 15 cultural heritage buildings, initially hidden under a generally unappealing commercial space. Nowadays, the New Bazaar has been transformed into a pedestrian area, a lively shopping, eating and night-life space and a perfect tourism destination.

The New Bazaar includes 308 businesses and provides 1,007 jobs. According to businesses statistics, there has been a duplication of sales compared to the time before intervention. In the area of the New Bazaar all the necessary facilities like: bars, restaurants, hotels, street food, Albanian cousin, Mediterranean cousin, etc are located.

The New Bazaar is clearly divided in 5 precincts
1. Dairy and Meat market of locally based products.
2. The green market of fruit and vegetables that is known as a social market where farmers sell local products.
3. The neutral area, which includes the shops located in the ground floor of the housing buildings around.
4. The creative area, where events like concerts, street art, fair, open air cinema and exhibition take place.
5. The transit area, which includes the surrounding area that was developed as the result of the main area.

The intervention has gone through a multi-dimensional dialogue, much wider than a single investment in an urban context. It is about a dialogue between the present and the past, old and new, a dialogue between business and the citizens, a representation of historical conversation of all eras, which excludes all previous urban craziness. It was exactly in the center of the Bazaar that a landmark of creative vitality had to be placed, the steel and glass structure. The brilliant idea to use the traditional carpets motifs as a background makes a fine tablecloth for the Bazaar welcoming ‘dining table’.

Today the New Bazaar it’s a symbol of urban life and destination of commercial and cultural value. It has truly become a “hip market”, thus a fixed pit stop for tourists and locals.
The main concept of the project is the dialogue which is reflected also in the materials used that are friendly with the traditional materials.

An important element of the project is the pavement, which is used as a means of communication. Terracotta covers the square taking us back in time to Tirana’s old neighborhoods of clay walls and tile roofs. Treating the floor as wooden parquet welcomes visitors inside the modern Bazaar house and, through some modern language, offers both merchants and the people the memory of the tile roofs.