Project: ARCH-301 Architectural Design IV – Urban Design
Location: Department of Architecture (ARC), University of Nicosia
The course focuses on architectural intervention in the city. Students identify and investigate the layered context of the site and its relation to the city operating at multiple scales. Through various recordings and mappings students discover the urban qualities and characteristics that are embedded in an urban area. The focus of the course is an urban design project, promoting awareness and critique of contemporary urban theories and issues thus testing through analysis, inquiry and proposed scenarios.
The Urban Studio concentrates on contemporary issues of urban design:
- Sustainability (both social as well as environmental)
- Livability (providing generous support systems for both the public as well as the private realm).
- Regeneration (setting new parameters and provisions that will keep a dynamic evolution for years to come )
- Flexibility/evolution (both in overall “Planning”, as well as in Buildings evolution through time).
- Bottom-up strategies (Becoming intimately related to the neighborhood its existing Fabric, its people’s networks and aspirations.)
- De-Gentrification (reversing of discouraging the process of “Same-Ness” or driven development.
Encouraging continuity, multiplicity of ethnicities, social classes and levels of economy.)
The Urban Studio attempts to consider alternatives to top-down approaches practiced commonly as a “Listener” and “Facilitator” as opposed to “Enforcer”. Practices of on-site close observations, testing and evaluating and experimenting with alternative strategies will be encouraged. Considerations of pragmatic nature will be accounted for but intelligently contested (what is Urban house, shop, recreation etc. in 21st century?)
The assumed permanence of the planner’s autocratic definitions of urban layouts, tone and usage definitions will also be challenged. (Dynamic evolution in time will be favored to planning set in stone and inflexible to adopt to future challenges).
Student names :
Individual works:
Nikolas Ioannou
Nursan Arpalikli
Evangelidou Elena
Irene Sergiou
Lazarides Haris
Ioannidou Martinez Tatiana
Alessandra Swiny 