The Department of Architecture [ARC] University of Nicosia, cordially invites you to the Catalysts Lecture and Presentations. 

[ARC] Catalysts are elective, intensive one-week courses that change every semester depending on the interests of faculty and visiting specialists. With the catalyst in place, the faculty is able to respond to newly developing research or design practices offering motivating and exciting opportunities to students and participants.

The catalysts running for this semester are the following: 

Section 01: Building Blocks for Social Sustainability: Sopaz Industrial Area, Kaimakli,  Nicosia

Coordinators:  Dr Lapithis Petros, Ms Papadopoulou Anna and Mr Chrysochos Andreas

The workshop aims to address the issue of social sustainability within a humanistic and cultural context, set on the platform of the built environment.  

Participants are called to consider matters of formal and informal urban structure, sense of community, social identity and ethics as those pertain to societal development in a neglected setting of particular historical significance.  Operating under the premise that social sustainability can be attained through means of collaboration and common awareness, the workshop’s findings will aim to activate urban spaces in a three-dimensional and temporal manner in order to induce values of social and egalitarian participation.  

Participants will consider issues of spatial form and will be called upon to present cognitive and experiential plans and maps that interpret their site’s conditions; Discussion will address the dynamic relationship between the profile and demographics of a community and its host environment, i.e. whether the built environment defines the social character of the community or whether community is, in fact, the influencing force that shapes and forms constructed urban environment.

Section 02: Curtains are not barriers

Coordinator: Mr Zannetos Konstantinos 

The 5-day workshop focuses on how creativity turns into a voyage of discovery that is characterised by the lack of borderlines in a common descend between architecture, interior design and painting in the field of art making. The workshop brought together students from the architecture, interior design and fine arts departments in order to unveil common paths and collaboration between the threedisciplines. The participants had the opportunity to explore painting and freehand drawing as well as practice the possibilities by using painterly means.

Throughout the history of art allegorical designs have received a diversity of definitions, each representing an orientation or school of thought, a period or a movement such as renaissance and naturalism, secessionism cubism, art deco, etc. All of these could be placed under the moregeneralised interaction between mind and nature. The workshop focused on how nature dictates the aesthetic form. It is only by observing nature that one can find the geometric codes of beauty which can then lead to a coherent understanding of aesthetic forms and harmony. Rediscover the design by drawing and recreate it onto canvas.