Bad karma in the centre of Nicosia
Something must be wrong with Ledra Street. I think it has to do with its feng shui, which creates a bad kind of vibe among Nicosians. To start with, they all got excited about its northern end and created the Committee for the Opening of Ledra Street. And now they have gone bananas about its southern end and established the Nicosia Citizens Against the Transformation of Eleftheria Square. I think we are lucky the new Cyprus Cultural Centre (CCC) hasn’t been placed somewhere around Ledra as well. Just imagine what would happen then. Our poor authorities would be unable to withstand much more civic pressure in just one street. It would be a disaster. Mind you, the feng shui around the Finance Ministry is not great either. And somebody has said that the Hopkins architects’ project for the CCC opposite is not that great anyway…
Joking aside, I am sure you all know the Eleftheria Square Transformation Dream has created strong emotions among many citizens of our beautiful city, and that some of them (300, I have been told) were given an opportunity to express their views at a recent meeting with mayor Eleni Mavrou and a panel of experts. I didn’t attend. But few days later, I happened to be at a party where some of the angry Citizens Against the Transformation were present. Here is some of the stuff I heard from them:
1) It is true that Christos Passas, Zaha Hadid’s local associate, said during the meeting an architect doesn’t have to visit a site he or she is re-designing because “one can easily detect on paper or by looking at a Google satellite image what the town-planning problems are”. (I wondered about this one but now I understand why the pictures of the Hadid’s project I saw on the internet look more like something from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind than Nicosia. It is because the people who created them looked at us from outer space.)
2) It is true that the whole piazza is going to be built of concrete. The angry “Citizens Against” tried to express their concerns and dislikes, and even argued the area underneath it would become unbearably hot during summer. However, they were told their thinking was faulty, they didn’t have any understanding of such things, and also that the architects had researched construction technologies available in Cyprus and decided that Cypriots were not able to work with anything else. In fact, anything other than concrete would be too sophisticated for them. (I find this a bit insulting. What about the beautiful stonework we have around in old houses and also the Venetian walls? Who built them? Aliens? I guess it is the result of the satellite encounter again.)
3) It is not true that the project is irreversible. It is reversible, very much reversible, because, as we all know, anything made of concrete can be pulled down. (What a relief. I can just imagine how we will build it, look at it, decide we don’t like it and pull it down.)
4) It is true that the meeting didn’t bring any results and that in spite of all the protests and a valid point about the public never having been consulted, the municipality has just decided to go ahead. (No comment.)
5) It is true that all these new projects around Nicosia will be realised regardless of what citizens say because in 2011 Cyprus is due to take over the EU presidency and our capital is preparing for this big event. (Ha, this is where my sense of democracy got upset.)
I have nothing special against the Eleftheria Square project because I don’t know enough about it (nobody has consulted me anyway). Cypriots have the right to have their “Bilbao Guggenheim Museum” if this is what they want, and I don’t have the right to stop them. But the fact that there is a bunch of guys in this country who have decided to transform the place with or without the support of the people who use and inhabit it makes me feel bad.
And, funnily enough, the whole situation is described in the most accurate way by one of the world’s most famous architects, 100-year-old Oscar Niemeyer who this week told the FT: “Architecture doesn’t matter. Someone who is out on the streets protesting is doing a much more important job than I am. Politics matters because we live in a shit world.”
Maybe Hadid, Passas, Mavrou and everybody else concerned should take these words into consideration.
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