Faculty of Engineering Facilities, University of Cyprus

The design philosophy of contemporary university projects has changed when compared to the dominant philosophy of the 60’s. The idea of the ‘campus-machine’ has been usurped by the concept of a university composed of a series of distinctive buildings of high architectural value, tenuously linked through some connecting tissue or even disassociated from each other. Athalassa campus has a backbone expressed through the longitudinal ‘belvedere’, to which all the functionally and morphologically independent units of the campus are connected.

The essential characteristic of the Faculty of Engineering, as prescribed in design brief, is its ‘hybrid’ nature. It is composed of a compound cluster of repeated elements of similar tectonic nature but varied in their academic and functional identity (Departments), and a central core which contains elements common to all Faculties. This core also forms a wide circulation ‘aisle’ which ties back into the backbone of the ‘belvedere’, forming a tactile reference to the wider context of the Campus.