The competition brief called for a new 1500m2 building for the Cyprus News Agency in Nicosia. The proposal envisioned a building that would be able to carry the required program intelligently, by offering dynamically flexible and reconfigurable spaces, but at the same time develop a rich spatial complexity, avoiding the generic. Ground floor spaces carry a public character, and include a generous lobby, a press conference facility and a canteen all wrapped around a rhomboidal central courtyard, that lets indirect light seep through. The upper level carries the press room and the media studios that again flank either sides of the courtyard.
The proposal built on the idea of a steel monocoque structure that unfolds to respond to programmatic and spatial parameters, while effectively becoming the formal manifestation of the building. Through this fluid continuity between structure and form, the project unfolds a continuous facade that materializes our responses to contextual parameters, into a seamless, coherent entity. This ‘façade mechanism’, made out of folded and creased thick gauge steel plates, was ‘cut’ to create large glass openings that were then superimposed with LED technology panels that would transform them to dynamic media walls.
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 Papanastasiou
Structural Engineering: EPS/ Nikos Kalathas
Mechanical Engineering: E-mech
Electrical Engineering: Electroproject
Lighting: n/a
