MOME Campus
Sporaarchitects teamed up with Studio Nomad and Palatium Studio to design a supermodern campus building for MOME. Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design is a leading creative university in the central european region. Considering the facilities of the existing buildings and the surrounding green area they designed this 21st century campus machine.
An art campus is successful only if it is living, diverse, filled with public spaces, provoking and inspiring at once. Spatial conditions for such a complex require that public spaces and spaces for creation be located in concentration and in a tense symbiosis. Here spatial tension is built on mainly modernist, bauhausian and corbusian principles, where economy, rationality and easy construction are of primary importance, the density of the building can be penetrated, and there is only a minimized footprint that is letting the garden and the park live, is setting the building up on its legs, is using the roof. These principles associated with the system of a nearly self-supporting building which are adopting most recent technical solutions lead to a manifesto that is sustainable, transparent and of long-range.
The MOME campus hopes to continue the intellectual work of Moholy-Nagy and others began in Dessau and Chicago, since their idea of progression and freedom is never finished. The building itself is a rationally organized and economic system equipped with high-tech that can be prefabricated and build by robots, supermodern nomadic hipster metabolism. It is an art and design campus: a conglomerate of buildings unrecognizably merging art, design and concept. It is deliriously rational and pervertedly precise. Unbelievable, but excessively free systems point towards perfect regularity, however, the small errors in the system animate the machine and humanize the perfect system of a machine. The system has not taken command yet, but control is comprehensive: the situation can only be pushed towards independence with a full transparency. Sometimes it feels good to go out in the garden or on the terrace, but it is only an illusion, you have to go back. Only the system can relieve you.
Classicism – socialist realism – suprastructure in Hűvösvölgy.
The functions defined in the design program are not organized in separate buildings in our conception but they make up a complex building instead with partly vertical, partly horizontal sections. The core of the building plan is a system of open spaces sketched up by negative forms among the neutral masses of buildings. The new building is interlocking with exciting inward and outward yards all along its borders, in several levels.
The representative front yard along Zugligeti Street is serving as a reception and filter area, the buildings are providing background for the exuberant vegetation. The rich substance of trees are playing an important role in shading the south frontispieces. The eastern part of the park is a rather busy passage, it is a formal garden among built walls. The upper, western part in the park is serving recreational ends. The opening besides the sports-grounds is an ideal place for garden parties. Community gardens are to be find in the north western part of the site. The western third of the park is becoming a vivid, near-natural place with the revitalization of Gondűző Villa.
The new building “B” and the centre for learning is forming a prism lengthwise: while it is making up a strong caesura interacting with the buildings separately, in the meantime it is interpreting the whole campus and is organizing it into a unity. However the setting might be seen rigid for the first time, in fact it is a very receptive entity subtly resonating with its proximate and broad surroundings.
The pole of the plan is the heart of MOME, which is appointed to be in the southern east quarters of the site by the planning program. The ligamental building is starting at the plinth of Farkasdy House, while the line of the rooftop (following the inclination of the slope) is coming down to the entrance level of the technological park thus confirming visual, functional and spiritual cohesion. The central functions are also placed on the lower levels of the new wing. The interior places in the building are defined by a complex system of passages and community places. This multilevel space is revealing the building complex and is meanwhile the interaction place of the community of the campus.
Our conception is summing up the intellectuality, the expectations and the vision of MOME that was conceived in the calling for the tender in an integrated structure. The built and natural elements are making up an inseparable unity, the whole site of the campus is obtaining a specific new interpretation and is getting into a new frame of reference. We are creating such an equilibrum in our plan in which the grandiose architectural innovation is generating synergy with open spaces.
