BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2016 – NATIONAL PARTICIPATION OF REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS

The aim of Archis Interventions, a community-based, non-profit offshoot of Archis is to support cities by supplying ideas and concepts that will help to revitalize public space and renew faith in public dialogue. Main focus of the work of Archis Interventions is post-conflict planning. Local partners play the main roles in the process, since they are the ones requesting intervention in the development of their city (www.archis.org). The activities of Archis Interventions in southeastern Europe began in 2005, when Kai Vöckler and his Kosovar colleagues founded a local branch in Prishtina (Archis Interventions/Prishtina). A network of independent urban initiatives and organizations in southeastern Europe was launched in 2008 by Kai Vöckler, in cooperation with Srdjan Jovanović Weiss. In almost all large cities in southeastern Europe, there exist independent urban initiatives that use their expert knowledge and experience to defend the interests of civic stakeholders. Such initiatives often work in isolation from one another or have only limited opportunities to participate in international urban discourse on new urban development, and planning methods and concepts. The aim of the Archis Interventions SEE network is to network regionally, develop international cooperation projects, share past experience, transfer relevant knowledge, and, last but not least, strengthen local initiatives by embedding them in supra-regional networks. 

The “Hands-on Famagusta” project’s ad-hoc technology for urban controversiesisa web-platformconsisting of three pools of designerly knowledge about controversial questions in regards to the role of the city’s commons during post conflict urban reconstruction, (Actors and Agendas, Other Cities, Urban Design Projects). The web-platform operation is supported by a series of board games that transform the controversial questions into playful negotiations and re-alliances amongst the game players.

The pool of “Actors and Agendas”is formulated during off-line activities such as roundtable workshops and consultation meetings between the “Hands-on Famagusta” project team and Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot Famagustians. The pool of “Other Cities”showsconcrete examples from other urban areas relevant to the Famagusta’s controversial questions. The pool of “Urban Design Projects” consists of students’ projects about Famagusta’s future produced by the Urban Design Studio of the University of Cyprus (part of L.U2.CY’s activities) and by the School of Architecture, KTH, Stockholm. The same pool includes also Urban Design references that are inscribed in the creation of the city’s commons. 

Mapping Architectural Controversies (MAC) is an interactive website dedicated to students and researchers working on controversies surrounding design projects, buildings, master plans, and urban and development issues. Documenting and visualizing recent controversies in architecture, it also aims to address a broader audience interested in the design of cities, spatial networks and built environments as well as planners, representatives of city government, NGOs and citizens. Originally based on the EU-funded project MACOSPOL, Mapping Architectural Controversies draws on a variety of documental sources and visual methods to explore the multifarious connections of architecture and society. Mapping Controversies comprises a research method, a teaching philosophy and a way to approach public debates. The platform serves as a database on controversies related to a variety of topics from Science, Technology, Innovation, Design and Urban Planning, provides tutorial guidance to the Mapping Controversies teaching and learning methods and their relevance to architectural studies, and showcases some initiatives in enhancing the public understanding of controversies.

Why Controversies? Nowadays, we are confronted more and more with uncertain architectural knowledge concerning the latest innovations in engineering and building construction together with the changing demands of clients and communities. This causes us to become embroiled in various controversies surrounding architecture and urban design, which reshuffle the multifarious connections between architecture and society.



City Reparo advances the Jane Jacobs notion that the city should be everyone’s neighborhood.

The “Hands-on Famagusta” project’s ad-hoc technologies for creating thresholds are:

Four transformative themes incubated in a summer workshop in Nicosia. They are the motor of the “Hands-on Famagusta” project team to make explicit the need to common urban imaginaries beyond the ethnically contested city. They are about: 1. sharing infrastructures, 2. creating a wide public waterfront, 3. turning the future of the ecological and cultural assets of the city into a common concern, 4. resisting the absence of the city’s commons during the extraordinary conditions of post conflict reconstruction processes. 

It is a process of long engagement of a fictional institute of border infrastructures that will serve to archive and connect rhizomatically with the current conditions of conflict territories and related practices.What will happen if the border is removed, not existing anymore? Or, is already borders a liquid and fluid zone? What could be the autonomous infrastructure of conflict zones? The Institute of Threshold proposal is about reactivating these questions in order to create a speculative realist approach of the function and spatial contradictions of border infrastructure. Cyprus as a contested borderland in the Mediterranean Sea is surrounded by refugee/migrant flow, civil war, sea patrols and liquid military control. As a starting point, the Institute of Threshold provides questions of conditions covering the mapping and constellation of surrounding zones and passing corridors in east Mediterranean. Urban warfare, destroyed and curfews siege town, border crossings and nomadic dwelling points out the era of post-human condition. We want to articulate with ongoing cases of conceptual framework of decay, autonomy, infrastructure, decolonization and forms of non-belonging.