Quartz Restaurant and Hotel is a complex building located in the lakeshore of Ohrid Lake about 15 km far from the city center. The project is an assemblage of indoor and outdoor gathering spaces with restaurant, cafe, kitchen, and sunbath laying platforms. The project’s concept, and later on its name, spontaneously emerges from the translucency quartz stone, the managing stone mine of the client.
By the road, the building is defined with a planar element, made up of the translucent quartz stone. The wall becomes the separator between the vertical circulation element, the attached stair, and the hotel indoor. The translucent nature of quartz gives the porosity to the wall, and thus a continuous but dim image of the hotel.
The ground floor holds the restaurant at the footprints of the building, and the self-cooking/serving areas at the setback of the retaining wall. The wooden platforms, which serve for laying sunbath but take the form of waving capsules, act as the transition element from the semi outdoor spaces to the lake.
Location: Pogradec, Albania
Area: 545m2
Year: 2013