Municipal office building

2011, Limassol

Type:  Architectural Competition

Prize:  3rd prize

Size:  m²

Status:  Ideas-drafts

Architects:  Georgia Daskalaki, Giannis Papadopoulos, Vassilis Papadopoulos

Architects collaborators:  Anna Moraitou

Civil engineering consultant:  Kostas Grigoriades

Mechanical engineering consultant:  Fanis Agelopoulos

The main objective was to design a building which completes the existing municipal complex while bringing forward its public character. We envisioned a contemporary and dynamic building and we put an emphasis on specific design elements including public space, transparency, movement as well as individual working spaces functioning along with collective activities spaces,like in a living organism. The new building maintains a dialectic relationship with scale, volume and the skyline of the existing municipal hall and neighboring buildings.

The diagonal axis is the main synthetical tool of the project. It defines an “active” diagonal front, the south elevation of the new building, which recedes to the back in relation to the municipal hall. This way,the building’s south facade opens to natural lighting as well as to the view towards the street from the inside. The square in front of the municipal hall is broadened, offering a new open space.

The new building “filters” and incorporates into its body public space:

The space of the square in the front gradually “penetrates” into the interior of the new building through an ascending ramp which “raises” the level of the square to the area of the main entrance and continues through a linear ascending course which leads to all the levels, along the central axis of the building mass.

This ascending linear movement is expressed indoors too, through a multi-storey void into the building mass(a typological reference to the courtyard space of the municipal hall) which functions as a public “core” around which the offices are organised and function. This void is emphasized in the roof of the building through a triangular skylight allowing light to reach as far as the entrance foyer.