Efforts are underway to relocate the state services currently on the site of the old Nicosia general hospital to allow the construction of the capital’s new archaeological museum expected to begin next year, the permanent secretary of the communications and works ministry, Alecos Michaelides said on Wednesday.
Seven architectural designs have been shortlisted among 129 proposals submitted to the ministry for the construction of the new museum following the international competition announced last year.
The new archaeological museum was among the projects President Nicos Anastasiades announced two years ago as part of efforts to boost economic activity in Nicosia.
According to Michaelides, the winner of the architectural competition for the new museum is to be announced on May 24. Meanwhile the authorities are looking to relocate the Nicosia outpatients’ clinic and the civil registry and migration department currently housed in establishments within the old hospital site. The old general hospital was demolished in 2010.
“Efforts are underway by the public works department for their relocation,” Michaelides told the Cyprus Mail.
The aim, he said, is to have the site vacated and ready for the construction of the €50m project sometime within 2018.
An award ceremony for the winning architectural design will take place at the beginning of June. This will present all seven of the shortlisted proposals.
President Anastasiades had said that a new archaeological museum was “a project that the state has owed to our country for years”.
“It is a work to honour our country’s 8,000 years of history,” he said.
The seven shortlisted designs are from Greece, Spain, Lebanon and Portugal. They are those of Dimitris Thomopoulos from Greece, GilBartolome Architectural Design Workshop from Spain, Paul Kaloustian from Lebanon, Pedro Pitarch Alonso from Spain, Site Specific, Arquitectura LDA and Manuel Aires Mateus from Portugal, Theoni Xanthi from Greece, and Yannis Kizis/ Kizis Studio SA Architects & Designers, also from Greece.
The architectural proposals were assessed by a nine-member committee chaired by Michaelides, and comprised of architects, among them the renowned Sir Peter Cook and Elias Zegelis, and the head of the antiquities department.
The new museum, which is to replace the current archaeological museum that was established in 1882 and is located a few metres away from the old hospital site, is expected to be constructed in two phases.
Phase one concerns the construction of halls for permanent and periodical exhibitions, storage rooms for antiquities, workshops, a restaurant, cafeteria, training room, shop, museum administration offices, underground car parking and landscaping of outdoor spaces. The second phase will include a library, an amphitheatre, the offices of the department of antiquities, further underground car parking, and landscaping of outdoor spaces.
