What is Shared? Architectural Heritage in Conflict
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla (guest editors)
Special Issue for Fabrications (The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand Journal)
This Fabrications special issue focuses on architectural heritage in conflict to interrogate cases in actively violent or post-conflict territories as well as cases where heritage is situated “in conflict” by the very interconnectedness of our globalised world, modes of mass migration, religious fundamentalisms, symptoms of imperialism, and other forms of injustice that transgress national geographic boundaries or ethnic identities. It seeks to unpack the ways heritage becomes instrumentalised in political, ethnic, religious, and cultural struggles. This special issue asks: If architectural heritage is always in conflict, then how do we contemplate the possibilities of sharedness? To answer this question, it is imperative to recognise that the quest for sharedness has produced different meanings and manifestations of sharing, understood at different scales and geographies.
| December 2024
On Buildings That No Longer Exist
Savia Palate and Linda Stagni
Paper Session at the 2024 EAHN Biannual Conference, Athens
What is the role of architectural history even after the demolition of a building? How does the vanished architectural object relate to the narratives of architectural history? What methods and sources hold the information that may be missing? And, to what extent methods and sources can be inherently ambiguous or misleading in their space-making, stories, and make-believe narratives regarding the “life” and “death” of these buildings?
| June 2024
The USHer app featured in "Agora: The Making Of" Exhibition
USHer team
Participation in the exhibition "Agora: The Making of," organised and curated by the Museum Lab on the Inauguration Ceremony of CYENS.
| 23 April 2024
USHering Counterhistories of Shared Architectural Heritage
Savia Palate
Peer-Reviewed Journal Article in "Architectural history isn't what it used to be" (special issue edited by Neal Shashore and Alan Chandler)
Charrette, Volume 9, Number 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 51-68 (18)
Can architectural history be collaborative and transmedial in its storytelling? This paper introduces USHer; a mobile app that is developed as an experimental methodological tool to identify and unfold stories of ‘Uneasy, yet Shared Heritage’ on the divided island of Cyprus. This paper questions the adequacy of traditional methods in the discipline of architectural history and the potential of digital technologies in the architectural historian’s task, encouraging alternative vantages for the projection of alternative futures and imaginaries.
| April 2024
When Architecture Disappears: Challenges in Methods and Media
Savia Palate and Linda Stagni
International Workshop, University of Cyprus and ETH Zurich
A collective reflection on what remains when architecture disappears, and the challenges researchers encounter when studying and analysing buildings that no longer exist. Three paper sessions discuss media and propaganda, demolished buildings as case studies, and colonial representations behind the act of demolition. The paper sessions are followed by a workshop that focuses on the overarching endeavours that brought the scholars together.
| 19 January 2024
Uneasy but Shared Heritage
USHer team
Awareness 2023 Art + Research Exhibition, after:noon project
Short stories of six buildings featuring in the USHer app, alongside a historical and contemporary image were introduced to raise awareness of the intangible value of buildings that no longer exist, or their first "life" has ended.
| 10-11 November 2023
YIF Participation
USHer team
UNDP Cyprus Youth Innovation Factory
The USHer team has been selected as one of the 15 to participate in the Youth Innovation Factory, a multi-month venture builder implemented by the SocialTech Lab.
| October to December 2023
What is "Shared"? Architectural Heritage in Conflict
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
Paper Session at the SAH Annual Conference (virtual)
What can be considered “shared” about architectural heritage in conflict territories, in what manner, and why? How can architectural history, and methodological explorations of writing the past, shed light on the complexities that surround the question of “who” defines modes of “sharedness”?
| September 2023
Fragments of Shared Heritage in a History of Conflict: A Methodological Experiment
Savia Palate
Conference Presentation ACHS-ECRN (Association of Critical Heritage Studies - Early Career Researchers Network) Symposium "Heritage Justice: Contestation, Motion, and Emotion"
The USHer App as an experimental methodological tool in exploring architectural heritage in conflict.
| 14-16 August 2023
An Archive that Listens in an App
[Ένα ψηφιακό αρχείο που ακούει σε μια ψηφιακή εφαρμογή]
Elena Papadopoulou
News Article Politis (In Greek)
An introduction of the USHer App in the Local Press
| 2 July 2023
An App Introduces Buildings
[Ένα app σας συστήνει κτήρια]
Chrystalla Hadjidemetriou
News Article Phileleftheros (In Greek)
An introduction of the USHer App in the Local Press
| 18 June 2023
Paper Trail Interview Series
Andrea Potts in Conversation with Savia Palate
Museum of British Colonialism
Histories of sharedness and histories of conflict on the divided island of Cyprus.
| 8 May 2023
Unintended Modern Heritage in Conflict
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
Conference Presentation for the "Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene" Symposium, MoHoA Conference (Bartlett UCL)
This presentation focused on reading the Ledra Palace Hotel through three modes of modernity in twentieth-century Cyprus, highlighting the way conflict becomes apparent in built heritage and reflecting on future post-human realities.
| 26-28 October 2022
Intangible, yet Impending Lives of Modern Heritage in Obsolescence
Savia Palate
Seminar Presentation for "Resilience and Future Heritage," International Student Workshop, HERSUS Research Project
This presentation focused on the inception and decay of the Berengaria Hotel to demonstrate the multi-faceted narratives a building may encompass, reading it through two different, yet simultaneous acts: (1) an act of small resistance and (2) an extractive colonised act.
| 7 October 2022
Gender Fairness in Architectural Research
Savia Palate
Outreach Presentation for "Gender Fairness and Equal Representation in Science," Faculty of Engineering, UCY for the HORIZON Europe: Investing in our Future Together of the Cyprus Research and Innovation Centre
How do you speak of gender fairness in a project that deals with 200+ buildings that were all designed by men? Can we speak of the "other" architect? And who are these "other" architects in the production of architecture?
| 28 September 2022
Αρχιτεκτονική Ιστορία του Παρελθόντος και του Μέλλοντος
[Architectural History of the Past and Present]
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
Newspaper article, Phileleftheros (In Greek)
A small introduction of the USHer project, hosted at Mesarch Lab UCY as part of a Phileleftheros column on the work of women working in architecture and engineering at the University of Cyprus.
| 10 July 2022
Staging a Domestic Through Travelogues in Cyprus, 1920s
Savia Palate
Roundtable participation at the Interest Group: Word Image Building, EAHN Biannual Conference 2022
Understanding the "domestic" as a fluid term that encompasses a transcalar negotiation between elements of interiority and exteriority (where the two cannot be perceived in binary opposition), this presentation explored the way domestic elements were translated by the colonised population (British colonial period in Cyprus) as a means towards financial independence.
| 15-18 June 2022
Uneasy but Shared Heritage of Modern Ruins on the Divided Island of Cyprus
Savia Palate
Conference Presentation at the SAHGB Annual Conference 2022: The Architecture of Borderlands
What are the challenges and constraints of researching contested borderlands as embodiments of absence, inconsistency, and controversial perspectives?
| 16, 17, 20 May 2022
Μπετόν, Γυαλί, και Θάλασσα: Ξενοδοχεία ως Μοντέρνα Αρχιτεκτονική Κληρονομιά
[Concrete, Glass, and the Beach: Hotels as Modern Architectural Heritage]
Savia Palate
Short text (in Greek) in the Monthly Bulletin of the Technical Chamber of Cyprus
A small introduction on the relationship among reinforced concrete, tourism development, and the modernist aesthetic in Cyprus during the 1960s.
| May 2022