Tall building award for Nicosia tower  

The iconic Jean Nouvel tower in the centre of Nicosia has won a prestigious award after being judged as the best tall building in the European category in the annual Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CBTUH) competition.

Judges were specifically looking for ‘those buildings that have the greatest positive impact on the individuals who use them and the cities they inhabit’, the CBTUH announced.

The tower, completed in April 2015, took home the gold as, according to the CBTUH, “the panel of judges recognised Novel’s White Walls tower architecture, which enforces environmental sustainability through an important connection to nature.”

“White Walls boasts vegetation on its north façade and a loggia – a covered exterior gallery or corridor – on the south façade, while local plant species poke out of the tower’s punctured concrete walls,” the competition’s organisers wrote.

The tower called ‘Tower 25’ or ‘White Walls’ was also featured in the March edition of the prestigious digital architectural publication Designboom and in Architect, the journal of the American Institute of Architects.

Completed last year, the 67-metre-high tower is one of the tallest structures in the Cypriot capital and a landmark of the city centre. Six of its 19 floors are offices, the rest are apartments.

Most of the office space and apartments, including the penthouse, were sold before construction commenced. The penthouse is on two floors and has its own swimming pool.

Architect Jean Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the “exotically louvered” Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and “candy-coloured” Torre Agbar in Barcelona, and Paris’ “defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric” Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (2015)

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