TAC Goes to Cyprus

The partnership between TAC and Colakides was formed in 1969, when local architects were striving to find their place in the rapidly modernising Republic of Cyprus. Colakides was one of many expatriate architects who returned to Cyprus after being educated and trained abroad in places like Greece, the UK, France, and Italy. These young architects, who were eager to participate in the country’s development, vigorously complained about the government’s reliance on foreign architectural firms, particularly for large-scale projects, which was a contentious issue the local press frequently covered (‘President Meets Architects’ 1968: 2; ‘Amathus Beach Hotel’ 1969: 1). The tension between local architects and the state heightened in early 1968 when the government announced an invited competition for the government complex in Nicosia for the newly formed Republic of Cyprus. Given the unprecedented scale and complexity of the complex (it was to be the largest structure to date on the island), the government expressed a preference for soliciting foreign architectural firms, which only further aggravated Cypriot architects. Colakides, who was then the president of the Cyprus Architects and Engineers Association, proposed an amendment of the competition terms to encourage collaborations between foreign and local firms.³ The government was open to this proposal and ultimately agreed to it, because at the time, collaborations between local and foreign professionals were the norm across the country, at least for large hotels, and very much in tune with the state’s aspirations (Phokaides 2018).⁴

The collaboration of Colakides and TAC in Cyprus that was born of the change to the terms of the competition is just one of many that TAC undertook elsewhere in the Middle East (Marefat 2008; Ackan 2022) and in Europe (Capanna and Clemente 2019). Colakides had briefly worked at TAC after completing his architectural education at Columbia University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design alongside Walter Gropius, and as he wrote in a letter to TAC, he had been trying to arrange a partnership with TAC in Cyprus since 1966 (1968). Although the TAC-Colakides proposal was shortlisted, it did not win; instead, the design of the new governmental complex was awarded to a partnership between a British and another Cypriot architectural firm. The irony of this grand project being constructed on the ruins of the British colonial secretariat cannot, however, have been lost on officials, one presumes [Pyla and Phokaides 2011]).

The Amathus Beach Hotel, Colakides’s first hotel design, realized his long-held dream of bringing TAC to Cyprus. By 1973, TAC had 272 employees and was bringing in an estimated $5 to $7.5 million a year (Kubo 2019), making it the largest architecture-only firm in the US. The firm’s international projects already included hotel complexes in the broader eastern Mediterranean region and the Middle East. Despite Gropius’s death in 1969 Colakides still saw TAC’s association with his signature (Kubo 2017, 2018) as a way to import a high-profile global modernist name into Cyprus. He maintained that the firm’s international expertise and technical know-how could ‘help Cyprus in its development’ and ‘improve the standard of architecture on our little island’ (1970a). After the plans for Amathus had been formalised, Colakides organised an exhibition of Gropius’s work to ensure that Gropius’s name and place in the architectural scene would be properly appreciated by the Cypriot audience as the hotel was being constructed.⁵

Although Gropius’s name and reputation added legitimacy to his bid to design the hotel, Colakides had already secured many design opportunities for his firm, establishing a name for himself in Cyprus through his business approach. Already by 1958, he had established Colakides Development Company Ltd. that ran in parallel with his architectural office. With a dual role as designer and developer, he became active in architectural professional circles, serving as the chair of the Cyprus Architects and Civil Engineers Association starting in 1965. He was au courant with the island’s political scene, a member of various national committees, and supported a number of charities. In 1973, the year Amathus was completed, he was appointed mayor of Limassol.

Colakides saw the Amathus project as a promising way to entice TAC to come to Cyprus because the company that owned the prospective hotel was ‘willing to pay a rate of architectural fees higher than the one paid in Cyprus, provided that such rate is reasonable’ (1969a). This higher fee still amounted to a compromise for TAC, however; by the end of the project, it claimed to have ‘spent over twice the amount’ of it (Morton 1970). Colakides made an even greater compromise forfeiting all payment so that TAC would agree to come, a concession he was willing to make because he believed the project was ‘a good investment for the future’ (1970b). Colakides thought such a partnership would not only be symbolically valuable but also practically valuable because he believed that given that TAC was already engaged in projects in the Middle East, Cyprus would be able to assume ‘a leading part in the development of the neighbouring countries’, despite its ‘small size’, if the hotel came to fruition (1970a). Colakides did not want his company to just be at the receiving end of transnational development but for it to emulate TAC’s global operations.

Capitalising on the Site’s Topography

The idea of a large coastal hotel in Limassol was initially proposed by Evagoras Lanitis, owner of the Amathus Beach Hotel, who maintained such a hotel was a long overdue ‘necessity’ if the southwestern part of Cyprus wanted to get in on the country’s tourism development (Lanitis 1973a: 16). The Amathus Beach Hotel was to be the first of at least three hotels Lanitis hoped to build across the island along with another in Greece in order to expand the portfolio of his company—Amathus Navigation Co. Ltd.—beyond maritime and shipping services (‘Amathus Beach Hotel’ 1969).

Until 1971, when construction began on the Amathus Beach Hotel, the state government’s investment in tourism had openly prioritised the eastern and northern cities of Famagusta and Kyrenia (Xenos 1970: 4). Of the 32 hotels under construction in Cyprus in the early 1970s, 19 were in Famagusta, while the rest were mostly in Kyrenia and Nicosia. The Amathus Beach Hotel was the only hotel under construction in Limassol in 1971 (Cyprus Tourism Organisation 1971: 18), a consequence of international development reports in the 1960s that encouraged the development of tourism in the country as a whole but characterised Limassol as being of no particular interest to the tourist (Beaudouin, Baud-Bovy, and Tzanos 1962: 190).⁶ However, by the late 1960s, the tourism industry in Cyprus had exploded, and so Lanitis’s push to advance Limassol tourism seemed justified—even if it was also one of many signs indicating an island in flux whose development was occurring more quickly than initially anticipated (Chang, Phokaides, and Pyla 2023). If there were concerns about the rapid expansion of tourism development in Cyprus, they were not openly expressed, as most of the press welcomed the Amathus Beach Hotel as a luxury property setting ‘the pace in Limassol’ (‘Luxury Hotel Sets the Pace in Limassol’ 1971a: 1) and making the island more competitive internationally. A hospitality school was also to be formed in Limassol to properly equip the Amathus Beach Hotel once completed, so the spotlight was cast on the potential of hotels that might follow (Colakides 1971).

The government of the Republic of Cyprus also supported Lanitis’s entrepreneurial aspirations, granting him permission to build in a sensitive area, albeit with restrictions given its adjacency to the archaeological site, and financing the hotel construction with a state loan via its second five-year plan (Republic of Cyprus 1967: 212), which dramatically increased the first post-independence development plan’s support for tourism development through low-interest, long-term loans that covered 40 to 60 percent of the cost of a given project. The area selected for the Amathus Beach Hotel was one the government had prioritised for tourism development, and so Lanitis expected to receive a loan that met 60 percent of the cost of construction, but the government only offered one covering 15.2 percent. The timing for such an investment on the state’s part in Limassol was perhaps unfortunate because in 1968, the government had begun constructing its own hotel, the Golden Sands Hotel in Famagusta, an ambitious undertaking covering 1,200 meters of the coastline (Pyla and Venizelos 2022: 133–50). The state had also supplied a substantial loan for the construction of the largest hotel in Cyprus, the Salamis Bay Hotel owned by the British firm Leonard Fairclough (Cyprus) Ltd., which Lanitis and other local investors were deeply critical of. Lanitis complained that ‘the government … was spending £3m on tourist projects which it was handing over to foreign businessmen’, a tacit reference to Salamis (‘Government Lending Policy Criticised’ 1971b: 3). The stakes were high for Lanitis, given that the cost of constructing the Amathus tripled, rising from £500,000 to more than £1,500,000 in less than a year during the process.

Building a hotel in Limassol was one thing, but to situate it next to the archaeological site of the ancient kingdom of Amathunta was another. This choice demonstrated how the island’s development prospects played into the hands of transnational investment and the global tourism industry through the appropriation of archaeological sites as economic assets for tourism consumption. Amathunta had been excavated by Cyprus’s Department of Antiquities since the late nineteenth century, leaving the surrounding area rather underdeveloped despite its proximity to the Limassol city centre. The tourism significance of the archaeological site was mentioned by a development report compiled by French experts—Eugène Beaudouin, Manuel Baud-Bovy, and Aristea Rita Tzanos—who had visited Cyprus in 1962 and suggested that ‘at the foot of the ancient acropolis, along the coast, a camp site [could] be set up for visitors arriving from Nicosia’ (1962: 150). While the government of Cyprus embraced the French report as a blueprint for the national plans for tourism development, its vision for Amathus was different. The focus of its second five-year plan was not camps, motels, or other types of short-stay accommodation but ‘first-class’ modern hotels (as opposed to luxury hotels), that would put ‘Cyprus as a holiday resort firmly on the map’ (Republic of Cyprus 1967: 207). The government emphasised modern but not luxurious hotels because it believed ‘the increase of middle class and non-luxury travellers’ in Western Europe was a leading factor in the expansion of tourism (Republic of Cyprus 1967: 206).

The state’s favouring of modern hotel resorts led to the proliferation of tower-block hotels made of concrete with a clean rectangular shape across the island. By the 1970s, expatriate Cypriot architects were questioning this typology along with the state’s rush for development, its poor planning, the lack of regulations, and the exclusion of architects from development discussions. Cypriot architects advocated for a hospitality-related architecture based on ‘Cyprus’ most saleable elements’ such as its landscape and sunny climate that could yield design solutions that were sensitive and profitable at the same time (Michaelides 1971).

The Amathus Beach Hotel’s design was a product of this climate that called on local sensibilities to mitigate capitalist aspirations for development. According to the Architectural Record, the Amathus Beach Hotel’s approach to the coastal topography’s ‘challenging task’ of fitting ‘the building with the slope of the ground’ (Colakides 1969b) distinguished it from ‘nearby high-rise buildings’ that had ‘already established an international tone’ (‘Hotels’ 1976: 121). Indeed, the hotel’s architectural design—a poured concrete building emerging from the earth—was substantially informed by the Amathus site’s gentle slope. The hotel’s design not only differed from that of nearby high-rise buildings but also bucked the trends of the hotels that were rapidly crowding the island’s urban coastlines. The concrete structure was skilfully shaped to allow the angular building to hide two of its seven levels below grade on the entrance side. Two thick cast-in-place concrete walls on either end of the building anchored a bridge, on top of which the guest rooms were placed, appearing to be suspended over the fully glazed facade of the lower floors. The two masonry walls thus allowed the lower levels of the building to be light and transparent while also creating an impression of a structure embedded in the soil and the landscape. Simultaneously, the two longitudinal facades of the hotel were slightly inclined so that all guest rooms would have unobstructed outside views (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Aerial view of the Amathus Beach Hotel after its completion. Source: Colakides & Associates, Architects & Engineers, digitization by Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2012.

Alternative approaches to tower blocks were also discussed in the French report’s development guidelines, which Colakides had shared with TAC in the early stages of the hotel’s design. The French report advocated the building of ‘mushroom resorts’, which combined the ‘beauty of scenery, interest of the site, peacefulness, possibilities for bathing, walks, sports, etc.’, claiming they were ‘the latest formula in tourism development’ (Beaudouin, Baud-Bovy, and Tzanos 1962: 99). These resorts, the report contended, were to be built on ‘unspoilt sites’, either mountains or beaches, and that their character could vary: ‘One might look like a village with chalets dotted about in gardens; another might consist of large hotels perched on a cliff top, etc. The possibilities are infinite!’ (Beaudouin, Baud-Bovy, and Tzanos 1962: 100). According to the report, mushroom resorts aspired to provide an experience of a ‘life close to nature’ (Beaudouin, Baud-Bovy, and Tzanos 1962: 103) and therefore starkly contrasted with typical hotels that were ‘simply providing rows or stacks of bedrooms.’

The Amathus Beach Hotel carried out the French prescription; its construction on the sloping site emphasized a connection between the building’s place-making and the topography, a feature the Archictectural Record praised (Figure 2). The Amathus site functioned like a mushroom resort in creating a pole of attraction for the adjacent but detached city centre, promising to initiate Limassol’s tourism expansion towards it while remaining close to the country’s only airport in the capital city of Nicosia, and in including a main hotel building, a large parking space, sports fields, and a swimming pool that was skilfully merged with large-scale open gardens to the south, towards the beachfront. In a later phase, a smaller apartment block and a second swimming pool were added to the west area of the complex. Extensive dining facilities on various levels facilitated sea views for the guests, and a large portion of the dining area remained open to the prevailing breezes, establishing a relationship between the building and the landscape.

Figure 2

The sloping site of the hotel in relation to the hotel’s volume shape. Source: Colakides & Associates, Architects & Engineers, digitization by Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2012.

Not only did the hotel’s site differentiate its design from other nearby tower hotels but also from other hotels designed by TAC during that time. The Porto Carras Grand Resort in Greece, the Inter-Continental Hotel in Sharjah, UAE (Kubo 2021b), and the Hotel Bernardin in Piran Yugoslavia shared design features with the Amathus Beach Hotel, but they were much larger and built on flat sites. The sensible siting of the building on the site’s sloping landscape, which perhaps owed to Colakides, who believed he brought a unique perspective to the design process as a Cypriot, was further complemented by a meticulous material selection. Self-consciously modernist, the main structure of the building was made of cast in-situ concrete, but the façades were coated with a sand-blasted finish or natural stone to connect the exterior with the rough textures of the surrounding agrarian landscape (Figures 3–4). The hotel’s interior reflected this same aesthetic. Interior finishes included carpets and floor made of local marble along with walls made of local bricks, plasterboard, and timber (Figure 5), fulfilling Colakides’s desire to create ‘a modern building using modern methods of construction’ that drew on ‘local materials and forms’ while avoiding ascribing ‘too much importance’ ‘to local architecture’ (Colakides 1969b). The Architectural Record noted that both TAC and Colakides agreed that ‘buildings for tourism must respond to local cultural and architectural traditions’ but that they rejected the idea that respect for local tradition ‘require[d] literal translation into a strictly indigenous building’ (‘Hotels’ 1976: 123).

Figure 3

The hotel under construction. Source: Colakides & Associates, Architects & Engineers, digitization by Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2012.

Figure 4

The hotel under construction. Source: Colakides & Associates, Architects & Engineers, digitization by Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2012.

Figure 5

Timber finishes in the interior of the hotel. Source: Colakides & Associates, Architects & Engineers, digitization by Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2012.

Colakides and TAC did not only acknowledge ‘local cultural and architectural traditions’ in embracing the coastal, sloping topography of Limassol for the Amathus Beach Hotel but also in situating it near the archaeological site, which the newly established government had designated a tourist attraction, thereby forging a relationship between modernism, archaeology, and tourism.

Appropriating Archaeology on the Beach

Colakides concluded his argument that not too much importance should be ascribed to local forms with the stunning assertion that local architecture ‘actually has no tradition’ (1969b). This claim served the purpose of justifying his own and TAC’s formal preferences for an abstract modernist aesthetic, but it was ironic in the context of postcolonial Cyprus, as Amathunta itself had only recently instigated debates over the island’s identity. In 1931, following the Greek Cypriot rebellion demanding the enosis (union) of Cyprus with Greece, British colonial rulers decided to suppress nationalist trends by using propaganda to create an alternative history of Cyprus (Given 1998). The archaeological findings in the ancient city of Amathus conveniently backed the ideological turn taken by the British and so became central to their new narrative. According to physical evidence from the 1927–1931 Swedish Cyprus expedition, the first systematic exploration of the early history of Cyprus led by the archaeologist Einar Gjerstad, a distinct population known as the Eteocypriots existed in Cyprus that spoke a peculiar language (Petit 1999). While little is known about the Eteocypriots, it has been widely confirmed among archaeologists that until the end of the fourth century BC, the ancient kingdom of Amathus employed two official languages, Greek and the Eteocypriot one, the latter attributed to the primitive populations of the island that seemed to have existed nowhere else (Aupert 2000: 17). Excavation findings show traces of habitation in the area of Amathunta dating to the Neolithic era, and so the Eteocypriots were probably living on the island well before the arrival of Greeks or Phoenicians.

According to Michael Given, the ethnic group of the Eteocypriots, a name coined in the 19^th century, was ‘invented’—and devised as to be neither Greek nor Turkish so as to demonstrate the existence of a hybrid civilisation in the city of Amathus that survived into the Iron Age. This construction proved useful to British imperialists in their efforts to neutralise Greek nationalism and push the idea of an ‘authentic Cyprus’ that had no ties to Greece (1998: 12). This insistence on the existence of a peculiarly Cypriot culture during the colonial period was projected onto the island’s architecture as well. British architect Alban Douglas Rendall Caröe, for example, who lived and worked in Cyprus, argued in a 1933 paper titled ‘The Fusion of Byzantine, Western, and Mahomedan Architectural Styles in Cyprus’ in 1933 that the hybrid identity of the Eteocypriot was reflected in the ‘fused and mingled style’ in the island’s architecture, which he described as a ‘Cypriot mélange’ (1933: 46–47). This colonial agenda to shape an identity on behalf of the colonised aimed to limit the agency of the local population in identifying (or creating) their own ‘tradition’. It is possible that Colakides’s dismissive claim that Cyprus overall ‘actually has no tradition’ was an internalization of this colonialist narrative; an internalization that together with his modernist aesthetic preferences led him to favour abstract and ambiguous representations of the locale.

Embracing the modernist preference for an abstract yet landscape-specific aesthetic became a convenient way to bypass debates on locale, an approach that also bolstered capitalist endeavours supporting global tourism, which was another rapidly growing neocolonial power structure (Wijesinghe, Mura, and Bouchon 2019; Bozdogan et al. 2022). The Amathus Beach Hotel was a product of this postcolonial globalization of Euro-American standards of hospitality that catered to tourists’ desire to enjoy accommodation on a sandy beach next to a prominent archaeological site. Satisfying this global market was so important that no one dared to halt the hotel’s construction, even when, during the excavation for the hotel’s foundation, a fifth-century BC graveyard was discovered (Figure 6). Today, the most interesting tomb of the archaeological site’s west cemetery is contained within the premises of the Amathus Beach Hotel. The tomb, which has a unique vaulted roof, was probably constructed for a rich warrior or a king and was perhaps an involuntary tribute to the island’s ancient past. The spatial inequalities suggested by this tomb are echoed in the Cyprus Department of Antiquity’s and the state government’s relaxing of the laws protecting archaeological sites to support the hotel’s construction and the state’s expropriation of land around the hotel after its completion that was owned mostly by low-income locals so that archaeological excavations could continue to be carried out (Δίκαιη Αποζημίωση Ζητούν οι Ιδιοκτήτες Γης στην Αμαθούντα 1972: 4; Ολόκληρον την Αμαθούντα Προγραμματίζει να Ανασκάψη το Τμήμα των Αρχαιοτήτων 1972: 1). Meanwhile, harvesting grain crops in fields with olive and carob and relying on nearby forests of oak to provide subsistence for goats and other animals, practices of an ancient kingdom over the centuries, could no longer productively support the island’s economy, which now seemed to be reaping the benefits of the tourism industry.

Figure 6

Site plan detailing the relationship between the hotel and the antiquities. The site plan records the graveyard that was also found in the hotel’s yard. Source: Nikoletta Vitti for Mesarch Lab, UCy, 2024.

Conclusion

The hotel opened its doors on 27 November 1973 to great acclaim. The local press described it as ‘the first of its kind in Limassol’ and ‘a great achievement of contemporary architecture in complete harmony with the natural environment’ (‘To Ξενοδοχείον Αμαθούς’ 1973: 7) (Figure 7). The architecture and the overall landscape development of the Amathus Beach Hotel was the outcome of the vision of foreign consultants, local professionals, and the modernizing state. Despite the intercommunal conflict on the island that had been evident since 1963, the Amathus Beach Hotel seemed to signal the continuation of the 1960s nation-building era that saw Cyprus and its architecture as an active participant in the global economy of sea, sun, and sand tourism. As Colakides put it, ‘If the political situation continues to improve, Cyprus will be a booming country the next few years’ (1969c). From the late 1960s, when the conflict seemingly subsided temporarily, through the early 1970s, an optimistic Colakides continued to negotiate new firm contracts, while TAC remained ‘anxious to hear about … other projects’ (Morton 1970). However, the partnership between the two firms was abruptly suspended soon after the opening of the Amathus Beach Hotel, which itself was forced to close six months after its opening, owing to a 1974 coup d’état by the Greek junta and a subsequent Turkish invasion that divided the island along ethnic and physical lines. The earlier construction boom and the growing tourism industry came to a halt, and several hotels across the country were bombed, ruined, or abandoned.

Figure 7

Publicity material for the hotel for its opening in 1973. Source: Lemesou Mnimes, 1973.

TAC and Colakides stayed in touch, even if TAC’s interest evidently declined after 1974 despite various efforts by Colakides to ensure the continuation of their partnership, including proposing his Cyprus office as a mediator for TAC as it worked out its final architectural and engineering drawings for its Middle East projects. ‘The cost of carrying out such work in Cyprus is much less than that of either the USA or any other neighbouring countries and Cyprus is a place where your personnel would much rather make, if necessary, their temporary home than any of the Middle East countries,’ anticipating that the conflict would again subside (1977). During the late 1970s, however, TAC was too busy ramping up its business in the Middle East to be interested in the war-torn divided Cyprus, and indeed, its focus on the Middle East turned out to be particularly beneficial for the company in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and increasing worldwide unemployment owing to the great inflation. As Peter Norton of TAC told Colakides, TAC was ‘more fortunate than most USA offices’ (1976).

As for the Amathus Beach Hotel, its closure was only temporary. Its rival coastal tourist resorts in the northern part of the island, Famagusta and Kyrenia, were occupied by Turkey, and as the southern part of the island needed to restart its economy in the portion of the country that remained under the sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus, many hotels were subsequently built in Limassol around the Amathus Beach Hotel. If Colakides and TAC sought to blend an abstract modernist aesthetic with the locale, to synthesize uses of archaeology with developmentalist approaches, or even to balance cultural sensitivity with economic profitability, these new hotels that came to surround the Amathus Beach Hotel in the 1980s, moved in a different direction as commercialization fully took hold (Figure 8).

Figure 8

A recent photo of the Amathus Beach Hotel that shows the vibrant construction of high-rise buildings in the vicinity. Source: U-SHer Project, 2023.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.