Larnaca under Shadow _For a shaded urban terrace

The project is about the new building of the municipal market of Larnaca, to be placed at the site of the old, now demolished, market, at the heart of the city,

In our proposal we introduced the idea of the ‘shaded urban terrace’. We acknowledge that the creation of shaded spaces has become an important urban condition in Larnaca, both due to the harsh sunlight during a large part of the year, and the need for outdoors life of the residents. There are at least three different conditions of shaded spaces that we found in the city: the spots of shadow created by the umbrellas along the sea-side promenade, the temporary shaded areas on platforms and recreational spaces and the semi-open shaded spaces in the interior of blocks and workshops. These different versions of shaded city space that manage to enhance public life in many different ways have become the motivation for our proposal.

In our proposal we introduce the shadowed terrace of the city into the new Markets’ building by covering it up with a canopy. This canopy becomes the agent that multiplies the existing shaded city space from the ground of the marketplace up to the highest level of the parking space. At the same time a new cityscape is formed by the creation of an uninterrupted ground level. With these two design tools, the canopy and the ground, the commercial surface of the city is enforced and becomes uniform while the market is placed at its center, a nodal point in the entire commercial centre of Larnaca. 

Competition entry by

AA & U (Socrates Stratis, Riccardo Urbano)

And DraftWorks (Christos Papastergiou,

Christiana Ioannou, Christiana Karagiorgi)