A luminous sphere is rising in Tirana, Albania, and it’s set to become one of Europe’s most audacious architectural statements. MVRDV, the Dutch architecture firm known for pushing boundaries, has won the international competition to reimagine the site of the old Asllan Rusi Sports Palace with The Grand Ballroom—a 100-meter-diameter orb that defies conventional building typologies.
The project merges seemingly incompatible programs into a single sculptural form. A 6,000-seat arena for basketball and volleyball sits at the heart of the structure, surrounded by hotel rooms, residential apartments, restaurants, and public spaces. Where most architects would separate these functions into distinct volumes, MVRDV stacks them vertically within the spherical envelope, creating a building that reads as both monument and machine for urban living.
Designer: MVRDV
The organizational strategy reveals a sophisticated understanding of public and private gradients. At ground level, where the sphere meets the earth, it creates an impression in the landscape, carving out a lower floor that welcomes visitors into the building’s most accessible spaces. From there, the programming ascends in horizontal layers, transitioning from communal arena spaces through semi-public hotel facilities to private residential units at the upper reaches. This vertical choreography ensures each function occupies its optimal position within the geometric constraints of the sphere.
The exterior treatment showcases MVRDV’s characteristic attention to facade articulation. A gridded skin of vertical and horizontal structural elements wraps the entire volume, creating rhythmic openings that modulate light and views while maintaining the sphere’s overall coherence. These apertures serve dual purposes: they provide necessary transparency for the various programs while reinforcing the geometric purity of the form through their careful distribution across the surface.
The Grand Ballroom arrives at a moment when Tirana is actively reshaping its architectural identity. The capital city has emerged as a laboratory for contemporary design in recent years, attracting international architects to contribute bold proposals. MVRDV’s sphere positions itself as a civic anchor, a building scaled to read from across the city while engaging pedestrians at street level through its distinctive ground-level imprint.
The technical ambition matches the formal boldness. Engineering a sphere of this scale requires sophisticated structural solutions, particularly when accommodating the varied spatial demands of arena seating, hotel rooms, and residential layouts within a continuous curved envelope. The gridded facade likely performs structural duties alongside its aesthetic function, distributing loads across the entire surface. This project represents a departure from the fragmented, multi-building approach that typically defines mixed-use developments. Rather than clustering separate towers around a shared plaza, MVRDV consolidates everything into a singular object. The sphere becomes a self-contained urban district, a building that functions as both landmark and neighborhood. It’s architecture as spectacle, certainly, but spectacle in service of density and programmatic diversity. The Grand Ballroom positions MVRDV within a lineage of architects willing to embrace geometric extremes. It stands as proof that even the most fundamental shape—the sphere—still holds potential for radical reinvention in contemporary practice.
The post MVRDV’s Spherical Grand Ballroom Redefines Mixed-Use Architecture in Tirana first appeared on Yanko Design.