Zigzag Apartment Building in the Suburbs of Budapest

Location: EU, Hungary, 1135 Budapest, Kerekes utca 1/a.

Client: ATREO Research Zrt.

Planning: 2015

Construction: 2016-2021

Scale: ~2000 m2

Architecture: LAB5 architects

Leading designers: Linda Erdélyi, András Dobos, Balázs Korényi, Virág Anna Gáspár

Designers: Ádám Mester, Judit Nyerges, Dávid Páncsics, Zoltán Szegedi, Tamás Tótszabó

Civil engineer: Terraplan ’97 | Balázs Puskás

Mechanical engineer: KLF Energo | Ervin Barta

Electrical engineer: Kelevill | Ferenc Kelemen

Fire expert: András Székács

Photography: Zsolt Batár

 

The site is located in the suburbs of Budapest. The district has an industrial historical background with dwellings originally for working class, now days many small-scale residential developments running.

The plot has an irregular shape. Furthermore, the corner of the future building at the crossroads was expected to be chopped by the local regulations. The goal of the project was to design an apartment building with a rational, perpendicular layout.

 

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We created a floor plan where the apartments are organized in a perpendicular system, but the street line is also evoked on the façade by the front of the balconies.

The walls have been given a dark brick cladding, a reference to the industrial past and architecture of the district. The front parapets of the balconies are white-clad, so they are in contrast with their background. The irregular length and location of the terraces create a playful image, and the shorter façade at the corner gains a unique character. Each balcony has its own identity, on the one hand as they are being used differently by the residents, and on the other hand by their geometrical distinctions.

The ground floor façade of the car park is covered with a metal grid from the street, it makes the volume feel like floating above the street. Its rounded corners are helping the passers-by as they turn around the corner.

The roof of the volume is mostly flat, except from the East, where we aligned to the roof plane of the neighbouring building.

In the interior we developed a minimalist design. Beside the black railing bars and grey granular resin floor, all surfaces are white. We have provided the corridors with large glass surfaces looking both the courtyard and the road, so it fills up the space with natural light and provides vistas to the garden and to the street during the day.