The project is situated in a privileged plot on the Makarios III Avenue of Nicosia, near its commercial and administrative center. It consists of a ground floor, featuring reception and lobby spaces, twelve floors of luxury office space with areas ranging from 250 to 300 m2, and three basement levels of extensive parking and utility facilities. Designed to carry some advanced energy saving electromechanical systems, the building offers a sophisticated ‘double façade’ feature, designed to allow the control of weather and noise parameters in order to offer a superior quality working environment. Office spaces will be lined with high quality materials, and will showcase unimpeded views of both Makarios Avenue and the historical center of Nicosia. The ground level opens up to a large plaza that offers direct access to underground parking facilities.
The project unfolds a continuous facade that materializes the responses of the architects to contextual parameters, into a seamless, coherent entity. This ‘façade mechanism’ registers a variety of design intentions, such as the formal gestures intended to respond to the proximity of the urban node, the geometric adjustments to the idiosyncrasies of the plot, and the calibration of the form to accommodate local planning rules. The building assumes a differential relationship with the plot’s context/ parameters, delivering intriguing, varied and dynamic formal and programmatic relationships.
The internal spatial syntax of the building has been developed based on a theory which presents flexibility -all levels can accept different arrangements, division layouts and uses – but without resorting to uniformity, instead developing conditions of ‘heterotopy’, where the formal articulation of the building predisposes but does not fix specific programmatic provisions or uses.
Architects: Michael Cosmas Architecture
Project Architect: Michael Cosmas
Team: Antonis Antoniou, Theodora Papanastassiou
Structural Engineering: EPS/ Nicos Kalathas
Façade Engineering: MDE Engineering
Mechanical Engineering: E-mech
Electrical Engineering: Electroproject
Lighting: LUCE Ataliotes
Project under development.
