Local authorities initiated a rehabilitation, but due to the luck of funds, they had to take hard decision. They demolished 80% of the ruined buildings, raised the zoning parameters, sold the plots, and then realised missing social institutions, while also providing decent flats for the former residents in other areas of the district. Criticism says it led to only rehabilitation of the streets and disorganized the community, also abolishing the heritage of the city – but to be true, no one really wants to bring back those “good old years” anymore.

Because of big areas without public spaces, the authorities also cut a new, wide pedestrians street into the urban fabric, and created a green promenade, being the most popular part of the development. LAB5 architects won the architectural competition to design the residential building coded “122b” on the last empty block of the development.

Our concept was looking for answers to 3 main questions.

How to adjust a new building to a neighbourhood if it has a bigger size then the traditional scale of the surrounding? Our plot is occupying 7 former plots.

How to maximize the number of apartments looking to the promenade while making the narrow side streets wider too? We wanted to respect the original street structure too.

And – the most important question – can we save architecturally the essence from the past of the district? We have been neglecting and overstepping these last 25 years, but it is also holding values we want to save for future generations.

We aimed to create a collage rather than a solid volume of a giant block. We collected different styles and added fresh ones to be presented on this new architecture, to resonate the original colourful, vivid streetscape of the area, and to merge it with the new face of the last decades.

We kept the “voids” too – the imprints of the never-built plots of the original surroundings. This way we developed an unfinished Tetris where each pixel bears its own style of finishing materials, railings, colours, volumetric behaviour. Facades grow higher towards the newly built pedestrian axis where other new high buildings are standing too. On two corners, two old modernist buildings were to be preserved, so we had to adjust our volume to match with their original size as well. We gained many terraces on the higher floors, standing on these terraces you can see the roofs and firewalls of the distinct with the mountains of wealthy Buda in the background.

The main direction of the volume is not perpendicular to the promenade, it is already showing the geometry of the street structure behind the block. Due to the number of courtyards and forecourts the building looks like a broken hashtag symbol on the site plan, where all these forecourts provide more space for the side streets and cast more sunray on the windows.

We solved placing 555 apartments in the block, many of them looking to the promenade on the North façade. We cladded this façade with warm toned glossy metal sheets to reflect more natural light on these areas. The front garden is left open from the street, works as a transition space between public and private areas. The inner courtyard provides intimate green areas for the residents.