An architect, designer, urban planner and academician with over 25 of international experience, we’re delighted Christos Passas, pictured below, has returned to the WAN Awards judging panel for 2024. He tells World Architecture News about the previous projects that best reflect his work and reveals why he knows more than most about the significance of the projects in the Humanitarian category.
“There are terrible disasters happening in the world every day and people on the front line suffer greatly. I have been one of those displaced peoples and my first childhood experiences were of a bomb-shelter-turned-kindergarten,” says Christos who was a young child in the city of Famagusta when the Turkish invasion of 1974 saw the separation of Cyprus.
“We were being bombed. My family all got in the car and drove out of the city. We ended up sleeping in refugee camps for several weeks,” he says.
It is apt that Christos was part of the team involved in Zaha Hadid Architect’s modular tents for refugees and displaced communities (seen in the main image above), a 2023 WAN Award winner in the Humanitarian category.
“My family were living in a tent. I was three or four at the time. As a child you don’t really know what’s going on, but I remember distinctively my first kindergarten was in a trench, essentially a ditch with a piece of corrugated tin over the top, all the children sitting in this narrow space inside, the teacher on the step,” he says.
Christos explains it meant a lot to see the work emerge on the ZHA-EAA Tents for Refugee and Displaced Communities which were designed in collaboration with the Education Above All (EAA) Foundation. The tents allow natural daylight in and are weather-proof, modular structures that can be easily installed, moved and re-assembled, incorporating components that enable simple on-site repairs if damaged. The tents have been donated to support populations displaced by conflict and natural disaster in Yemen, Syria and Turkey.
“There is a deep purpose and significance to these sorts of projects,” he says.
“It’s not so much about the design in terms of the look or form, it’s about how easily you can build them and how quickly people can deploy them to get shelter.”
He adds: “Humanitarian projects have value beyond what is proposed. It is important to maintain a sense of humanism, generosity, philanthropy, charity. It’s about doing more to reduce the suffering of others, but also an act of humility on our behalf.”
Read on to discover Christos’s key projects.
1.Eleftheria Square, Nicosia, Cyprus
“In some ways it was personally challenging going back to the country I left when I was 17, having lived and worked in the USA, Germany and now the UK for so many years. I had deja-vu’s in the process, getting reacquainted with my tribe and my people, as it were. But I’m very proud of this project. Nicosia has the unfortunate title of being Europe’s last divided capital and 50 years on the Greek Cypriot population was looking for a way to define its future in hope and peace. The project integrates archaeology, ecology, traffic and transport solutions in a space of recreational activity and civic gatherings. Cyprus offers a mosaic of cultures and peoples, and this project demonstrates what the island stands for culturally in a timeless way. It involved a lot of stakeholder research and engagement with everyone from local authority figures to taxi drivers and shopkeepers. We asked anybody and everybody in the area and tried to accommodate the people’s wishes into the design. Place making and urban regeneration is a powerful transformative process.”
2.Phaeno science Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany
“Built in 2005, this was the first of its kind in Germany and a pioneering project for Zaha Hadid Architects exploring notions of fluidity and parametric design. It was one of the early seminal projects we had done. Coined the “magic box”, it’s a place of scientific discovery, an alternative space for education and a building that explores notions of space and time. Collaboration with the client and exhibition designers was really good. We figured out how to exhibit the objects in the space in a way that wasn’t disciplinarian. We mixed them up, allowing the kids who visit to discover their own curriculum. The undulating concrete structure lifted the exhibition space off the ground creating a covered plaza beneath the building and unblocking the passage of people around the building.”
3.Sberbank Technopark HQ, Skolkovo, Russia
“This high-tech project reconceptualises the way workspaces are designed. Through the use of algorithms and other digital techniques the design offers a new workplace ecology that aims to engage staff with their creativity and their problem-solving capabilities, rather than their more mundane productive skills. We’ve been exploring the idea of the workplace jungle – a way of offering a range of different types of spaces for different types of work, spaces that can easily be reconfigured and that allow room for chance encounters.”
4.OPPO HQ, Shenzhen, China
“This high-rise building features four ellipsoidal glass towers that merge to create a deep plan structure that allows the company OPPO to achieve a high rate of flexibility through the extensive reconfiguration of the interiors of the spaces whilst offering a high degree of sunlight and views out over the skyline of Shenzhen.”
5.Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Halls, Russia
“This project was designed through understanding the relation and vibration of musical waves to create internal soundscapes using AR/VR technology. Formed as a continuous surface with pockets where a large auditorium and a smaller recital space float over a covered glass box allowing people from a variety of backgrounds to enjoy music of all types. The whole building is floating above the ground and we built a glass pavilion underneath to represent that the space is open to everyone. We always try to build public spaces inside buildings, places that are never entirely private.”