Professor Alessandra Swiny

Alessandra Swiny is an Architect of American and British origin. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard/Columbia University (2000) and a Masters of Architecture from Harvard University (2004) in the United States. She is a Professor, at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus, where she has been teaching since 2005 and is a tenured faculty member. Alessandra was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Barnard/Columbia Colleges Architecture Program for Fall 2011. She was the principal architect with M. Hadjisoteriou at ‘Sub_Supra Studio’ from 2008 until 2013.

In June 2008 her winning entry (with M.Hadjisoteriou & A.Dimitrakopoulos) for ‘Europan 9 Competition’ in Clermont-Ferrand, France went into its second phase of design development. She has represented Cyprus in the Venice Architecture Biennale three times. This year she submitted the project, ‘Reverberating Courtyards: Carving Histories’ as curator with Y.Hadjichristou (team: A.Postekkis, P.Pavlidies, M.Georiou) and was in the final selection process.

From 2009 Alessandra participated in an Erasmus Intensive Program (completed in 2012) for the project ‘Demochange Cities’ with professors and students from Milan, Trieste, Hamburg, Cluj, and Vienna.

Alessandra is very passionate about the development of an architects’ education. Her design focus shifts from small scale detailing to issues pertaining to the larger urban context and articulates the importance and complexities of issues faced at all scales. From 2015 she was Unit Leader of ‘In/Out Crisis’ (with Y.Hadjichristou and M.Georgiou) for 4th and 5th year Architecture students at the University of Nicosia. She believes that an equilibrium must exist between; functionality and creativity, as well as research, practice, technology, culture and wit; while always striving to have a minimum impact on the ‘environment’ and to design buildings that function as ‘intelligently’ as possible. In recent years her work concentrates on issues of emergency architecture.