Albpastrim headquarters

Albpastrim, (Alb-Albania, pastrim-clean) is a company that offers different cleaning and maintaining services. The company’s new headquarters offices are located in Tirane Industrial Park, a complex of 44 warehouse units made of prefabricated concrete, fifteen percent of them used as office space and the rest as a storage.

The height of the warehouse unit is 7.60 m with an area of 750 sqm. Fifteen percent of the space is divided in two floors, 100m2 each, scheduled to be used as an office and showroom area. In order to fit the required program, it was necessary to wide the space. Therefore our design proposal extends the floor by doubling its area. The additional structure is made of monolithic concrete, with columns that keeps the same grid as the existing ones and slab beams, parallel with the other prefabricated slab, trying to coexist with the context. The program was very condensed, because of the variety of activities that will take place as conferences, seminars and lectures other than those of the office.

Therefore, we proposed a central box floating in the middle of the space, separated by folding glass modules on three sides, that creates a circular passageway which distributes in different spaces. The box can stay closed and serve as meeting room or closed working pod, and can stay open, widening the space so it can be used for lectures, seminars or opened workspace.

The design had to represent the company name, so we chose to use only white plaster, glass and metal, except the kitchen where is the only place we used warmer materials as wood, so one can feel disconnected from one environment to another. The intervention had to be evident, sincere and create a contrast with the concrete environment. On the other hand is important to create a natural relationship between this different materials. The goal was for almost everything to be monochrome and the colors to come with the users of this environment.