St Moritz 住宅综合体丨秘鲁利马丨sofronis marcou architects

Firm： sofronis marcou architects

Type： Residential › Multi Unit Housing

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2020

SIZE： 1000 sqft - 3000 sqft

BUDGET： $1M - 5M

The residential complex is located in a central residential neighbour of Limassol. It is developed on three levels and it consists of 7 apartments: 6 one-bedroom flats and a whole floor three-bedroom penthouse.

The general arrangement of the project was resolved in a conventional typological manner; all the apartments were placed on the upper floors, allowing for communal, secondary uses and green areas to be freely formed on the ground floor pilotis. The circulation zone is placed in a central core, minimizing the circulation area and maximizing the internal area of the apartments. The parking spaces are organized in an underground level.

The major design strategy was the reconfiguration of the main building mass into four distinctive, smaller volumes, by subtracting full-height sections from all sides of the initial mass. As a result, the building’s scale reduces, and it adjusts to the scale of the surrounding dwellings. At the same time, the overall footprint of the building decreases and the central circulation core can be naturally ventilated and lit. Using a homogenous architectural vocabulary, the four volumes are lifted and juxtaposed generating a constant dialogue of solid and void forms between them.

The building envelope was resolved independent from the load bearing components, allowing it to respond autonomously to the interior functions of the apartments. The external folding shutters are not only used as a shading device, but also as an abstraction device for the design of building envelope. By extending them to areas beyond the obvious, the distinction between floor levels and the enclosed spaces disintegrates and the strong monolithic characteristics of the four volumes are enhanced, resulting in an ambiguity of the scale and the function of the project.

The building’s high energy performance is achieved using mainly passive means. The external folding shutters diffuse daylight and prevent overheating from solar radiation both to the interior and the exterior spaces. In combination with the heavily insulated walls, the conditions in the spaces remain flexible to adjust to seasonal weather and daily conditions according on the comfort zones of the users. The green areas on the ground floor slab are planted with local perennial plants and cover an area equivalent of 25% of the total plot’s area reducing the thermal mass of the building. Two planted regions descend from the ground floor to the basement of the building, allowing the underground parking spaces to be naturally lit and ventilated.