"During the reform era (1830-1848), Pápa was a late baroque looking city...renowned for its fairs and more than a thousand artisans...The center of the city's intellectual hub was the Reformed College, hence, Pápa was also named the Athens of the Transdanubian region."
The exciting feature of Pápa, a city with an artisanal-eclectic ambiance, is that you can see the accumulation of time on its buildings. The new student home, with its mass and plaster architecture, blends into the continuity of the cityscape. In its colour scheme and window design, the building evokes the late-baroque aesthetic of the reform-era city center but rewrites it with contemporary architectural solutions.
Each room has its bay window, which functions as both a characteristic element of the exterior and a piece of furniture in the interior for relaxing and studying. We found the inspiration for this idea while strolling the streets of Pápa, and we redesigned the city's historical bay windows into a gradable dormitory scale. To the outside, these windows show that the rooms as spaces for personal development are tuned to light and clarity.
We didn't cover or paint the interior structures, we tried to show everything in its raw, honest reality. It is a restrained, Puritan design approach that conveys an educational valu we beleive is compatible with the spirit of the Reformed Church. The building is mostly prefabricated (stairs, walls, slabs, roof panels) due to environmental reasons and in order to reduce on-site labour. In the courtyard, a multifunctional sports field with extensive green areas has been developed.
The façade has a vertically raked plaster finish to give the massive surfaces next to the precise, flat windows a more rustic appearance, emphasising the rooms' projection onto the façade. The "hand-raking" of the façade (palping through the surface) pays homage to the past master builders' craftsmanship. Pápa has a long tradition of plaster architecture, which the new structure aims to continue.
BIVAK studio
