The project is sited in the centre of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. The plan area lies in the buffer zone established by the United Nations between the Greek and Turkish zones. The media centre is intended to simultaneously express the island's history in a reunited Cyprus and act as an initial step towards redeveloping the city centre. The plan looks ahead to a future which, certainly after the recent referendum, seems a long way off.

Since the centre of Nicosia was split in two, its core functions have largely shifted to the suburbs. The old centre is fast deteriorating. Simply restoring it would be a totally inadequate response to the situation arising after reunification. It is vital to develop a new perspective on the city centre in a reunified Cyprus. The city has to transform if it is to meet the needs of modern society. To this end my project introduces a strip that follows an invisible boundary. The strip combines new civic facilities with open space that allows the compact city to breathe. It reinstates old morphological structures to preserve the notion of the old city. The Nicosia Media Centre stands at the place where the principal axis between the southern and northern halves of the city crosses the buffer zone.

A key departure point for the building's design is the trade-off between programme, form and construction. The programme is founded on the idea of a software community. In the Nicosia Media Centre you can look up, study or add information to the vast number of sources there. The building's form responds to the city's morphology, which it expresses by, among other things, extending the space of the new square into the interior. The main hall can be directly accessed from the gently raked square, with a way through along the glazed facade to the raised platform on the second floor. The construction adds to the building's uniqueness. Storey-high lattice girders and loadbearing facades facilitate the distinctive large spans and cantilevers that lend direction to the ensemble and tie the Greek and Turkish zones together. The enclosed parts of the building are clad with a system of interlocking tiles in endless mathematical patterns. These are a metaphor for the endless amount of digital information that surrounds us nowadays.

Place of education: TU Delft
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Marc Schoonderbeek, Oscar Rommens, Lars Courage