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Archaeological museum
@Cyprus International Competition

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POP RUINS

Archaeological museum

@Cyprus International Competition

Nicosia,

2017

A PARTIALLY BURIED COLUMN DRUM - What if the building induces an ambiguous reading of its volume as a fluted column drum partially buried in a garden as a real repository of the archaeological wealth of the island?. Placed over a sunken garden of future ruins, the circular profile of the drum and the emptying of its perimeter to fine tune its scale to the fragmentation of the site provide the building with a strange presence. The main body of the Museum hovers above a set of partially buried gardens and the spaces for laboratories and storage, just touching the ground level in the accesses to the public axis.

A CROSS COMPOSED BY FOUR VAST INTERIORS - What if the interior of the Museum rather than a conventional lobby, hosts a public axis composed by four big public interiors? What if the Museum is a cross and the entrance is right in the center? A series of internalised public spaces: the bronze Canopo which opens onto the square, the entrance open courtyard, the inner lobby and finally the inner garden in connection with the river park. All of them form a varied sequence of spatial compression and expansion (nymphaeum, door, patio, vaulted space, indoor garden and Park) generated by the intersection of the geometrical system of longitudinal naves and spherical caps that produces domes in the interior and craters in the rooftop. These vast Mediterranean interiors will host receptions, lectures, performances by artists, educational programs, minor exhibitions and public events going beyond the role as a museum and becoming a real extended public body.

NAVIGATING THE BUILDING - A sequence of public spaces can be crossed by the visitor where a choreography of spherical caps intersects the vaulted beams to expand perceptually the exhibition spaces of the naves. The arms of the transept are accessible from the lobby above through two monumental stairways, so they are part of it, while functionally independent. On each side of the public inner cross, the stairs, the access to the offices and laboratories and other ancillary spaces are contained within widen and hollow walls perforated with openings allowing to perceive the main exhibition spaces.

PROCESSES OF DISCOVERY - Resembling an archaeological excavation the ground level is partially an excavated land formation and hosts the archive and the laboratories, with parallel naves for the bigger objects, separated by thick storage walls containing smaller objects. Although not open to the public, the archive and the laboratories are visible for the visitors from above, therefore playing also an important role in the museum. Visitors can see the storerooms and watch the staff working in the conservation of the pieces. This museum is not an archive of death pieces but a place for interaction and education where the new need for exhibition as well as storage and research can have place. The flexibility offered by the naves and the easiness to incorporate divisions allow maximum effectiveness, easy access keeping the Museum alive and responding to technological innovations, archaeological discoveries and different curatorial approaches.

POP RUINS: GHOSTS OF FUTURE BUILDINGS - What if the sunken garden is an inverse ruin where ghosts of future buildings grow? The museum is surrounded by a series of gardens based on the same formal mechanisms than the main building. As in an archaeological garden the formal gardens that build spaces with vegetation and low walls will become the expansion of the Museum. The ruins will serve therefore as formal and material bases for the future constructions, inverting the arrow of time: reversed ruins of the future. The satellites will indeed follow a cycle that starts with a garden of ruins, that in a second step is transformed into a cage constructed with vegetal elements, and that in a third step is transformed into an ars topiary piece containing spaces, and as the last step in this process each satellite will be destined to grow and gradually materialise in a stable built element, finally ending in a building containing program, and presumably in the future, becoming a ruin again.

Directed and designed by

Amid.Cero9

with

Lorenzo Perri

Archaeological museum

@Cyprus International Competition

Nicosia

2017

A PARTIALLY BURIED COLUMN DRUM - What if the building induces an ambiguous reading of its volume as a fluted column drum partially buried in a garden as a real repository of the archaeological wealth of the island?. Placed over a sunken garden of future ruins, the circular profile of the drum and the emptying of its perimeter to fine tune its scale to the fragmentation of the site provide the building with a strange presence. The main body of the Museum hovers above a set of partially buried gardens and the spaces for laboratories and storage, just touching the ground level in the accesses to the public axis.


A CROSS COMPOSED BY FOUR VAST INTERIORS - What if the interior of the Museum rather than a conventional lobby, hosts a public axis composed by four big public interiors? What if the Museum is a cross and the entrance is right in the center? A series of internalised public spaces: the bronze Canopo which opens onto the square, the entrance open courtyard, the inner lobby and finally the inner garden in connection with the river park. All of them form a varied sequence of spatial compression and expansion (nymphaeum, door, patio, vaulted space, indoor garden and Park) generated by the intersection of the geometrical system of longitudinal naves and spherical caps that produces domes in the interior and craters in the rooftop. These vast Mediterranean interiors will host receptions, lectures, performances by artists, educational programs, minor exhibitions and public events going beyond the role as a museum and becoming a real extended public body.


NAVIGATING THE BUILDING - A sequence of public spaces can be crossed by the visitor where a choreography of spherical caps intersects the vaulted beams to expand perceptually the exhibition spaces of the naves. The arms of the transept are accessible from the lobby above through two monumental stairways, so they are part of it, while functionally independent. On each side of the public inner cross, the stairs, the access to the offices and laboratories and other ancillary spaces are contained within widen and hollow walls perforated with openings allowing to perceive the main exhibition spaces.


PROCESSES OF DISCOVERY - Resembling an archaeological excavation the ground level is partially an excavated land formation and hosts the archive and the laboratories, with parallel naves for the bigger objects, separated by thick storage walls containing smaller objects. Although not open to the public, the archive and the laboratories are visible for the visitors from above, therefore playing also an important role in the museum. Visitors can see the storerooms and watch the staff working in the conservation of the pieces. This museum is not an archive of death pieces but a place for interaction and education where the new need for exhibition as well as storage and research can have place. The flexibility offered by the naves and the easiness to incorporate divisions allow maximum effectiveness, easy access keeping the Museum alive and responding to technological innovations, archaeological discoveries and different curatorial approaches.


POP RUINS: GHOSTS OF FUTURE BUILDINGS - What if the sunken garden is an inverse ruin where ghosts of future buildings grow? The museum is surrounded by a series of gardens based on the same formal mechanisms than the main building. As in an archaeological garden the formal gardens that build spaces with vegetation and low walls will become the expansion of the Museum. The ruins will serve therefore as formal and material bases for the future constructions, inverting the arrow of time: reversed ruins of the future. The satellites will indeed follow a cycle that starts with a garden of ruins, that in a second step is transformed into a cage constructed with vegetal elements, and that in a third step is transformed into an ars topiary piece containing spaces, and as the last step in this process each satellite will be destined to grow and gradually materialise in a stable built element, finally ending in a building containing program, and presumably in the future, becoming a ruin again.


Directed and designed by

Amid.Cero9

with

Lorenzo Perri

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lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London / Prato

projects@lemonot.co.uk

ABOUT

This is Tooltip!

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023

close-40
This is Tooltip!
lemonot

Sabrina Morreale, AA Dipl
Lorenzo Perri, AA Dipl (Hons)

London, Vienna, Stockholm, La Paz and Italy

projects@lemonot.co.uk

ABOUT

This is Tooltip!

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founding partners of Lemonot – a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. We graduated together at the Architectural Association and we’re now based between London and Italy.

Our projects re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. We relentlessly seek new forms of togetherness, with a contextual yet transterritorial approach that aims to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. 

We experiment with the language of artistic strategies in public space, empowering alternative narratives and unexpected interactions – to initiate unconventional acts of place-making. We explore how architects can contribute to a peculiar reinterpretation of the city, defining novel 1:1 experiences through short and long-term occupational strategies. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, we often intervene as both facilitators and designers – constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

Our constant engagement in academia is a crucial part of Lemonot. In 2018-19, we taught as Adjunct Professors at INDA in Bangkok and we’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna  (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, we now lead the Architectural Design Studio 7: Convivial-ism at the Royal College of Art in London. 

We collaborate with several cultural institution – including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) – and our projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Archifest Singapore 2019, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023.

Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia – curated by Fosbury Architecture – of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, and Sabrina has been appointed as the 2024 Enel Foundation Italian Fellow in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.

Lina Fellows 2022/2023

“Spaziale” – Padiglione Italia, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023