Christos Hadjichristos University of Cyprus, School of Architecture, Nicosia, Cyprus 437
tions as well as questions to arise. Easy connections to make were between the size
of property plots and distance from the settlement core, the river or the type of
topography, between vegetation and farming activity with topography and soil type,
or between topography and transportation roots. It should be mentioned that the
students had not at this stage taken any computer courses yet, some teams did not
use the computer at all, while others took advantage of the computer knowledge of
some of their members and used AutoCAD and Photoshop.
In the next stage the students visited the area, took photographs, spoke to differ-
ent people in the area and recorded their observations on or over the layers created in
the previous phase. With this enriched knowledge of their region, each team selected
a site on which to design a complex of four pavilions. One of the pavilions was for
exhibiting paintings, another for sculpture, a third for small treasures or jewellery
and a fourth for items with writing (books, engraved stone etc). At this stage the site
was assumed to be flat while the program asked for a basement, a ground floor and a
mezzanine level. The overall dimensions of each piece were limited to a 10m 10m
10m cube or to a rectangular version of it 14m 7m 10m. The last stage required the
grouping of the four pavilions on the site selected by the team in the first stage.
Accompanying each team in its struggle to handle the grouping of the four pavilions
allowed for some observations to be made. The first two teams that seemed to have
managed to come up with a strategy were the ones that combined a simple, clear
and strong observation about the site and an equally convincing argument regard-
ing their pavilions. The first team observed that the hill ridge chosen to place their
complex offers a distant view of the pavilions from the highway on the one side
and from the village on the other, and that the four pavilions are too different thus
discouraging a grouping strategy that uses physical proximity. It was consequently
decided to use an axis or route to mediate this grouping, allowing for an indirect
relationship to be established between the pavilions. The second team to have a
breakthrough was the one with a comparatively flat site near the coast and a main
idea which wanted the serene, perfect line of the horizon between the sky and the
sea uninterrupted. This combined with the adaptation of a formal vocabulary already
expressed in one of the pavilions helped the team move along the design process,
fine-tuning the grouped pavilions while other teams were still lost in a labyrinth of
equally promising, or not, possibilities.
Both groups that were late in moving forward had a comparatively complex
topography and were jumping from one main idea to the other revealing that these
ideas were basically forced arbitrarily on the site as well as on the pavilions. The
weakness of the main ideas or concepts was partly due to the superficial analysis the
team made of their site and of the character of the pavilions.
It should be mentioned that the emphasis at the beginning of the exercise was to
work with models rather than drawings, in an effort to encourage the students to study
the object three dimensionally. At the scale and complexity of the single pavilion this
seemed to help rather than hinder the student who had to deal with a flat site and
was not required to collaborate with anybody else. With the first attempts to group
the pavilions on the real site and the specific context though, it was becoming clear
that the complexity has reached a level that called for a different approach.