Project: Metalic Club

Architects: Maden Group

Location: Gjakova, Kosovo

Area: 3200 m2

Project Year: 2019

Photograph: Atdhe Mulla

… Very simple, save the old, the new one should looks colorful. Each of them has its own significance, was the concept for Metalic Club.

Metallic - a project characterized by an approach that attempts to contextualize contemporary architecture within a typical modernist setting of the last century. The project represents an intervention within one of Kosovo's largest industrial buildings (Metalik factory, Gjakova), which is at the same time a marker of an important phase of urban-architectural development in the country. By this intervention, the building have to be transformed into a nightclub, and what would be more "underground" for this function than an industrial environment destroyed by the last war in Kosovo.

The concept is based on the fact that any new intervention should fit the inherited architecture, without damaging and stripping it of its stylistic features. Significant portions of the building have been preserved, not interfering with them at all, while each new intervention has been treated in color in detailed way, to be regarded as an important layer of present time.

The existing building is a embodiment of modernist architecture, entirely based on the concept of "form follosfunction", designed with a module that exemplifies itself by creating a rhythm within space. And in the proposed project, it is precisely this module that is preserved, replicated and tends to dominate the interior design.

Over the time, the building has been embraced by greenery, which today shows the best of architecture's relationship with nature. On this relationship, is developed the concept through which the industrial will be transformed into something natural. All this has been achieved by not removing the greenery from the existing walls, but adding and using it as one of the key elements of design.

The existing metal construction of the factory is the "modular grid" on which the new design is laid. The new construction elements are made of concrete, which is not by chance one of the most representative materials of modernist architecture. The specifity of these elements is that they are treated to look extremely elegant and "light" in space.

Other elements of the interior design are characterized by panels, profiles of metal grids, modular "glass boxes" filled with greenery, chains and everything else that merges into a giant space that seems to communicate and reinforce its presence by giving it color life that characterizes the importance of the intervention.