Panayiota Pyla
Job Title: Associate Professor, Department of Architecture
Institutional affiliation: University of Cyprus
Panayiota Pyla is an architectural historian and theorist, and Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, where she also directs the Mesarch, Lab. Before her current position, she served on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA, 2002-06), and in 2004 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Design School. Pyla holds a Ph.D. in the History-Theory of Architecture and Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines the intersections of architecture and urbanism with the history and geopolitics of de-colonization, development, and environmentalism. Her writings focus on a) Doxiadis and Ekistics; b) modernism, nation-building, and ethnic conflict in Cyprus; and c) the spatial history of leisure in the Global South. Among her works is the edited volume, Landscapes of Development (2013) and the forthcoming co-edited volume, Leisurescapes: Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism in the Global Sunbelt.
Publications
Pyla, P. (Ed.) Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. Cambridge: Harvard University Aga Khan Program, 2013.
Pyla, P., and P. Phokaides. “’Dark and Dirty’ Histories of Leisure and Architecture: Varosha’s Past and Future.” Architectural Theory Review 24, no. 1 (2020): 27-45. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13264826.2020.1753282
Pyla, P. “Baghdad’s Urban Restructuring, 1958: Aesthetics and Politics of Nation Building.” In Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the 20th Century, edited by S. Isenstadt and K. Rizvi, 97-115. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008