Architectures of the Cooperative Movement
Savia Palate
Paper Session at the SAH Annual Conference
Call for Papers now open!
This session welcomes contributions from a broad geographic range, from the twentieth century or earlier, highlighting case studies of the architectures of cooperative movements. It examines different scales and definitions of cooperation, foregrounding it as a socio-spatial practice within and beyond imperial organization.
The conference will be held in Chicago, USA 14-18 April 2027.
| Submission Deadline: 8 June 2026
Travelogues for the 'Industry of the Foreigners'
Savia Palate
Fieldnote Contribution
in
Astengo, G., Carrai, R., Delgado, J. A., Dianat, A., Kaskar, A., Mchunu, N., Nakamoto, Y., O'Neill, J., Palate, S., Sarica, S., Wang, Z. & Wheat Ordu, S., (2026) “Objects and Media of the Home”, Architectural Histories 14 (1), 1–33.
A critical commentary on how colonial media can be misleading, controversial, but also, and somewhat ironically, prompt acts of resistance for the colonised population.
| February 2026
An USHer to Uneasy but Shared Heritage in Cyprus
Savia Palate
Peer-reviewed Journal Article
International Journal of Heritage Studies (2026), 1-21.
From the outset of independence from British rule in 1960, Cyprus was marked by intercommunal conflict between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, which led to the abrupt division of the island in 1974; a key moment in Cyprus’s modern history, fragmenting the island with buffer and military zones. Inevitably, modern architecture that was once embraced as a vehicle to nation building and a path to modernity became entangled with decolonial struggles, intercommunal conflict, and the island’s current physical and socio-political division, comprising some unintended heritage, of which its value is ambiguously defined. This article discusses the theoretical framework of ‘Uneasy, but Shared Heritage’ that moves beyond the binary of contested or shared heritage, and introduces USHer, a mobile app devised as a methodological experiment informed by contemporary debates that challenge official heritage lists and the role of digital tools in opening the meaning(s) of value – what is defined as heritage and why, by whom and for whom – to a broader audience. As a disciplinary encounter between architectural history and critical heritage studies, USHer is investigated as a mediation of the intangible value of architectural heritage in contested territories.
| February 2026
We Are Hiring
We are looking for a young researcher to work on our new project, VISION ERC-PATH 2/0525/0017
Deadline for Applications: 20 February 2026
| February 2026
The Architects Collaborative in Cyprus: Archaeo-Tourism and Landscape Configurations
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
Peer-reviewed Journal Article
Architectural Histories (2025), 1-20.
The Amathus Beach Hotel was a collaboration between the local Greek Cypriot architectural firm Colakides & Associates and The Architects Collaborative in Cyprus. Completed in 1973, the project was embarked on at a time when the newly independent Republic of Cyprus sought to modernize and build the nation by expanding its tourism industry. The northeastern coast of Cyprus had seen phenomenal development since the mid-1960s, but the southwestern coast of the island was lagging behind. The southwestern city of Limassol saw the Amathus Beach Hotel as a vehicle for catching up with its northeastern counterpart. The hotel did indeed put Limassol on the international tourism map, while the configurations of its site sparked a reconsideration of the relationship between landscape and archaeology that was tied to a rethinking of regionalist trajectories by global modernism in the 1970s. The upshot of this rethinking was new alignments between corporate capital and tourism.
| December 2025
Afterlives of the Modern: Social, Political, and Environmental Entanglements
Roundtable
Carmen Popescu, Hannah le Roux, Petros Phokaides
Opening Remarks by Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
What can modern architecture - its building techniques, social aspirations, or (sometimes toxic) materiality - mean today and can it have new ways of relating to the world?
This roundtable was part of the SUCY lecture series of the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus.
| 8 December 2025
Histories of Modern Architecture for a Future Heritage
[Ιστορίες Μοντέρνας Αρχιτεκτονικής για μια Μελλοντική Κληρονομιά]
Roundtable
Alkis Dikaios, Karin Georgiadou, Panayiota Pyla, Paris Philippou, Zenonas Socratous
USHer Installation: An Archive that Listens
Savia Palate
The event is organised as part of the European Heritage Days. It raises the question: What is left when the building is gone to discuss the role of the architectural archive in preserving architectural heritage (both in its tangible and intangible form).
| 24 October 2025
A Transcalar Interiority: Travelogues, tourist guides, and Modern Hotel Architecture in Cyprus
Savia Palate
Paper Presentation
2025 SAH Virtual
This paper discusses the way modern hotel architecture in Cyprus can be read as a tangible invocation of images produced and reproduced in travelogues and tourist guides. Beyond, however, stereotypical impressions of satisfying the tourist gaze of the foreign traveler, this paper explores and sheds light on hidden histories of tourism development in Cyprus during colonial rule.
| 30 April - 4 May 2025
Can we USHer People to Buildings that No Longer Exist?
Savia Palate
Poster Presentation
2025 SAH Annual Conference, Atlanta USA
The poster introduced the USHer app, with a particular focus on the case study of the demolished Women's Bazaar in Nicosia as an ongoing project through which the team explores transmedia storytelling in architectural history. The project is theoretically informed by concepts of ambiguous archives, speculative fabulation, and epistemic disobedience to depict the role of the bazaar as a shared gathering place for the anonymous colonised woman in 1940s Cyprus.
| 30 April - 4 May 2025
The Salamis Bay Hotel: A Residual Imperialism in Cyprus
Savia Palate and Panayiota Pyla
Peer-reviewed Journal Article
Architectural Theory Review (2025), 489-507.
The Salamis Bay Hotel was the largest constructed in Cyprus in the 1970s, owned by a British construction firm that established its presence on the island during colonial rule (1878–1960). This paper introduces the concept of “residual imperialism,” extending scholarship on informal imperialism and neocolonialism to discuss how imperialism, after the end of British rule, took new forms through tourism, local politics, military divisions, and suspended sovereignties in postcolonial, yet contested, Cyprus. The Salamis Bay Hotel is discussed in relation to the invasion and abrupt division of Cyprus in 1974. While foreign ownership purportedly remained in British hands during this time, the hotel’s pre-1974 context demonstrates financial dependencies upon the Greek Cypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, whereas its post-1974 life involves the complex workings of British entrepreneurship in relation to the economic interests of the de facto state of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
| February 2025
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
Last Updated on April 3, 2026