Moutalos open spaces tranformation
2015, Paphos
Type: Architectural Competition
Status: Ideas-drafts
Architects: Georgia Daskalaki, Giannis Papadopoulos, Michalis Sioulas
Architects collaborators: Stavros Voskaris
Architecture students: Victoria Aristodimou
The current area of Mouttalos has been shaped by a sequence of events turning the area from a Turkish-Cypriot neighborhood to an ethnic quarter, and then into a refugee settlement.
The project maintains that the planned redevelopment should not exacerbate the above mentioned emotionally loaded past, but to respond instead to the memories of conflict and separation, promoting the (Cypriot) landscape as a common place for all past and future inhabitants of Mouttalos:
Thus, the proposal brings forth the Cypriot land through the materiality of its surfaces and the extensive use of planting trees, aromatic plants, herb, sand, grass that characterize the island’s landscape.Consistent with promoting the Cypriot land, we proposed the use of compact adobe bricks, i.e. pieces of baked locally produced clay, for all the areas of intervention. This way, the land, the very soil of Cyprus exists throughout the composition in the whole project.
Additionally, Cypriot flora dominates the proposal: Olive trees, carob trees, turpentine trees, mulberry trees, mint, basil, thyme, lemon verbena and others, compose the unified Cypriot landscape.
The design of open spaces does not passively follow the continuous fronts of existing buildings. On the contrary,a free-form triangular grid formed by floating light metal structures define the suggested areas of hard and soft surfaces, shaping a contemporary ‘carpet’, which is gradually integrated in the natural landscape.
