Structural Design Partner for Cyprus Architects

A commercial office tower in Limassol where the brief refused intermediate columns on the office floors. Clear spans exceeding 10.5m on every level, glass façade on the most exposed elevations, and a programme that places the RC basement two levels below grade. The structural strategy is hybrid by necessity: an RC basement resolving earth pressures, parking geometry, and the transition into the superstructure; a steel superstructure buying the spans without paying for them in beam depth; and a joint regime designed with FEM analysis (IDEA StatiCa) where the connections carry meaningful demand. The architectural intent — column-free office floorplates wrapped in glass — drove every structural decision, not the other way around. Structural design completed; drawings submitted for quantity surveying.

The architect designed a "floating" first floor — a mass that reads, from the street, as if it is held in air. Nearly half of the upper floor projects past the ground floor footprint without visible intermediate columns or bracing breaking the illusion. The structural answer combines a tuned reinforced concrete cantilever system with transfer elements concealed within the floor diaphragm: load paths routed through the ground-floor structure and grounded silently, leaving the geometry to do the talking. An external swimming pool integrates directly into the cantilever system's load envelope. Currently under construction.

A single-storey reinforced concrete house in Athienou. The architect set two intersecting structural problems: a curved cantilever roof slab projecting over the verandas without supporting columns, and a site with enough fall to make a single floor level wasteful. We answered with a split-level foundation system that follows the natural grade, and a deep-beam solution running concealed within the roof slab that delivers the curved cantilever without visible structural support at the perimeter. The result: the roof reads as continuous geometry, not as a slab held up by columns.

A luxury seafront villa 150 metres from the Mediterranean. Two structural problems arrived together: curved geometry across the principal façades and extensive cantilever overhangs that the architect wanted column-free over the open-plan spaces beneath. The solution combined a cantilever beam system sized to the architectural overhangs with marine-zone reinforcement detailing — increased cover, corrosion-resistant detailing, attention to construction-joint exposure — appropriate to salt-air exposure over a sixty-year design life. The geometry was preserved; the durability question was answered separately.

A 3.5-metre cantilever slab supported on fin walls, with the principal living level kept free of intermediate columns. The fin-wall strategy was the architect's: structure becomes an architectural element rather than an apology hidden behind cladding. Our job was to make the fin walls work as both vertical structure and as cantilever supports — sized for the 3.5m projection plus dynamic load combinations, detailed for the joint condition where the cantilever slab meets the fin wall, and reinforced to keep the architectural slimness intact at every section.

When the design is unconstrained but the ground fights back, the structural answer lives below grade. A luxury 4-level villa in Pareklishia: ~700 m² across semi-basement, ground floor, first floor and second floor, sitting on montmorillonite clay — an expansive soil that contracts seasonally as moisture cycles, threatening differential and horizontal movement of any conventional foundation. The solution: a raft foundation underpinned by piles that bypass the expansive layer and bear on stable substrate beneath, stitching the building to ground that doesn't move. The superstructure above stays architecturally free; the geotechnical problem was contained where it belonged — at the foundation.