Bofill Taller de Arquitectura Built "The Veil" Into an Albanian Hillside

Pablo Bofill describes the project as a veil. Not a wall, not a complex, not a resort. A veil. The language is precise: a veil is transparent, it follows the form beneath it, and it does not claim the landscape as its own. The Veil is a residential resort project in Dhërmi, Albania, designed by Bofill Taller de Arquitectura under CEO Pablo Bofill, with design principals Hernán Cortés and Alborz Mohammadi. It is distributed across two plots and includes 366 apartments and 77 villas organized into sixteen different typologies. Construction was underway as of May 2026. ## Stone Paths, Ceramic Tiles, and a Courtyard That Curves Around a Tree The material choices at The Veil connect the architecture to the site rather than asserting an identity over it. Locally sourced stone is used for paths and a base that steps with the slope. The buildings are unified by a façade treatment of concrete and glazed ceramic tiles, with a color palette derived from site samples of the surrounding landscape. The tile color did not come from a palette book; it came from the actual earth and vegetation on the hillside. The most revealing design decision is the communal building at the center of the complex. This structure contains the social club, restaurant, gym, and pools. Its footprint was designed to curve around an ancient tree rather than remove the tree or build around it with a fixed geometry. The courtyard accommodates the existing organism rather than replacing it. In a project of 366 apartments, that is a small detail. In terms of what it says about the design philosophy, it is the whole story. ## Ricardo Bofill and the Shift in the Studio's Vocabulary Bofill Taller de Arquitectura was founded by Ricardo Bofill in Barcelona in 1963. Ricardo's major works include the Les Espaces d'Abraxas housing complex in Marne-la-Vallée (1983), the Walden 7 residential tower in Sant Just Desvern (1975), and the La Muralla Roja in Alicante (1973). These projects are characterized by assertive monumentalism: forms that make claims about history, power, and collective life on a scale that demands attention. Pablo Bofill's The Veil in Albania represents a different posture for the studio. The documentation around the project describes it as a "gentler" approach, aiming for context-sensitive integration rather than assertion. The volumes follow the natural contours of the mountainous terrain, rising vertically among trees to capture Adriatic views without clearing the hillside. The explicit design ambition is to minimize environmental disturbance rather than to maximize presence. That shift, from Ricardo Bofill's monumental vocabulary to Pablo Bofill's contextual vocabulary, is one of the more interesting generational design stories in contemporary architecture. Type7, whose curatorial archive has documented multiple Bofill Taller projects, posted the full eleven-image document of The Veil this week. ## The Adriatic and Why Albania Is Happening in Architecture Now Albania opened its coastline to large-scale development investment in the mid-2010s after decades of relative isolation. The Dhërmi coast, where The Veil is located, has attracted architecture from firms across Europe who are working with a combination of Mediterranean light, dramatic topography, and lower land costs than comparable sites in Montenegro or Greece. The result, across multiple projects, is a body of architecture that is trying to negotiate between tourism infrastructure and ecological restraint. The Veil, with its veil metaphor and its tree-accommodating courtyard, is among the more articulate responses to that tension.