New Cyprus museum
2016, Nicosia
Type: International architectural competition
Prize: 25635 m²
Status: Ideas-drafts
Architects:
Giannis Papadopoulos, Vassilis Papadopoulos
Architecture students:
Andreas Mpyrros, Laoura Tziourrou
The New Cyprus Museum will be a key institution for promoting cultural diversity, through showcasing Cyprus’s unique cultural heritage. The museum will also become a new example of democratic access to archaeological resources. Ancient times taught us that Cypriots can maintain a healthy dialogue with other Mediterranean cultures, without compromising their own cultural identity.
The New Cyprus Museum will focus not only on physical objects of the past but on Cypriot heritage as process. It will showcase a scientifically proven methodology for discovering archaeological objects and will also encourage a social process of “reconstructing” the past.
By expanding outside acquired knowledge, the educational role of the museum is enhanced. The innovative exhibition set-up uses archaeological science as a vehicle for communication and reveals perceived cultural value as social construct open to being interpreted, redefined and sometimes even questioned.
Infrastructure
The New Cyprus Museum building does not imitate artefacts, neither aesthetically nor morphologically, avoiding to become a symbol of a given past that asks for one-way interpretations.
It is conceived as an open, adaptable structure. It is a space for housing and categorising antiquities while displaying them as archaeological artefacts in the process of being found. The concept is extremely flexible and designed to embrace future expansion. Most importantly, it permits a variety of spacial relationships. Therefore it allows for multiple categorisations (according to time, location etc.), as well as a network of cross-category relations. This set-up encourages multiple interpretations both by curators and visitors which sparks an ongoing dialogue between cultures.
More than a space that houses and serves the exhibition, the museum’s premises are a cultural hub for Nicosia city, an important, lively urban space where all people belong. The Museum design will attract the community not merely by existing, but through its spaces being actively involved in urban experience. Therefore, it is a high priority of our team, to get outdoor space to penetrate the Museum and vice versa: to have Museum functionalities expand into open-air space, actively giving it character.
Design strategies
- Main axis: the outdoors
The Museum’s open-air spaces form an axis linking the old building to the river´s linear park. The New Museum´s piazza, the large roofed area before the entrance, the entrance and the square by the river, form a line of consecutive outdoor museum spaces, used for formal and informal events and activities. This area becomes the museum’s main vein, and establishes dialogue between the old building and the new, creating a visual link between their entrances, but also a functional link because of the New Museum’s piazza. Also spread along the axis is the New Museum’s main entrance space; like an elongated ‘agora’ it links the museum’s piazza to the river’s square; the new building becomes then a Gate or starting point of the linear park (which begins from its plot and extends towards south Nicosia), and therefore an indispensable feature of the city.
- Zoning
The new building’s design is made up of parallel 11.4-meter wide zones. The zones connect or separate, extend or contract and vary in height, thus creating indoor and outdoor spaces of differing sizes, light qualities and views. This network of spaces reflects the project’s multiple functional requirements, while making creative use of the plot’s shape. The concept offers flexibility in dividing space and is open to expansions either by lengthening specific zones to the sides or by adding new ones.
- A public excavation site
The New Cyprus Museum experience will be a hybrid between a visit to an archaeological excavation and an archive. The excavation site will be associated to route of discovery (permanent exhibition) while the archive to route of reconstruction (museum warehouses).
This rectangular excavation dig is at the heart of the museum’s design, cutting diagonally through its zones, and opposing their direction. While zones align to main axis (outdoor spaces), the excavation site follows the city lines, in parallel to main road and old landmark building.
This is the entrance space and permanent exhibition, descending in depth, similar to an auditorium, allowing for multiple vantage points and therefore ways to view exhibits, while it boosts visitor sense of direction. A marked saw-tooth roof covers this central space, while parallel 2.6-metre thick walls divide it into sections. The inside of the walls serves necessary functions, such as staircases and exhibition windows.
- Permanent Exhibition
Walking through the exhibition will feel like exploring an excavation site. Visitors can descend into the dig or walk across the edges, gaining an overview on the space, as well as separate views of artefacts. The exhibition is a path between parallel walls, in linear chronological order from the Early Aceramic Neolithic Period to the Early Christian Period, interspersed with important highlights, such as the Aphrodite, or Bronze Age themes etc. Visitors move from old to recent, in and out of the excavation dig and also go through dark (depth) and luminous (surface) spaces in tune with themes covered in each section.
- Visible Storage
In latest years, more and more museums across the globe open warehouses to visitors or create visible storage galleries in line with museum democratisation trends, and the need to freely access collections.
The New Cyprus Museum explores Visible Storage with linear 2 to 3-level structures, in selected spots across the permanent exhibition. In this way, visitors can at any point stray from a predetermined path, enter the walls and find themselves in a space where artefacts – in contrast with the main display – are densely stored following warehouse classifications (e.g. material). Visible storage structures link through staircases and lifts to the Main Warehouses located underneath the main exhibition. These «Lit Towers» echo 19th century archives or storage spaces, and offer an impromptu, personal experience to museum visitors.
