Daniel Cutler and Charlie Donaldson
[Re]Animating the Pedieos
Site Axonometric
Kípos | Bahçe | Garden. [Re]Animating the Pedieos. The project is situated within the deserted buffer zone of Nicosia, offering a potential new future for the city.
School/Level
Category
- Residential
- Community and Culture
- Industrial and Process
- Infrastructure
- Urban
- Speculative/Futures
- Masterplanning
Year
The thesis proposes a choreographed assemblage of architectures of production, a landscape of resource and celebratory seasonal gardens as a means by which to [re]fabricate the fragmented city of Nicosia, the capital of the divided island of Cyprus. The UN Buffer Zone, implemented in 1974, is a continuous island-wide barrier, an economic and cultural divide that passes from west to east across the city. Sometimes several meters wide, only permeable on foot at the defined pedestrian crossing of the Ledra Gate, the Buffer Zone is an emptied geography.
Water in Cyprus is a precious resource. The project engages directly with the associated issues of supply and use across the divide through the implementation of a new water-centric infrastructure fed by the Pedieos aquifer, the source of the Pedieos River which once ran west to east across the fortified Venetian city. Prone to floods, the river was redirected south and that mis-alignment, together with the change in global climate, resulted in the barren landscape of the buffer zone and a dry river basin beyond. Reanimation of the water supply to the site presages opportunities for cultivation and fabrication through a landscape of craft production directed to cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaboration
A dynamic extrusion of walls composed from the dredged ruins of the site and the projected lines of the adjacent city fabric, activate the landscape as a network of follies, factories, workshops and seasonal gardens and colonise the reanimated urban grain. Here, shared spaces offer relaxation to the citizens of both the Republic, and Northern Republic of Cyprus. Local flora and fauna are gradually reintroduced and the dissonant environment – human and non-human – is re-set.