Szabó House

The site is a place of an earlier military barracks near to the capital of the country, which has been converted now to a housing park. The client has a 1,200 square metre plot, on which they wanted to build a two-storey house built for a family of four.

On the ground floor you can find the living area, on the upper storey the sleeping area. In the centre of the living area there is a fireplace. The open fire in the heart of the building symbolizes the unity of human beings and nature.

As for the materials we used traditional ones. The walls are laid from ceramic bricks, the slabs are wood and reinforced conrete, the roofs are covered with tiles. The covering for the outside wall of the main part of the building has been made from used bricks collected when pulling down an old house. The upper part of the building is covered with wooden boarding painted brown.

The building gives the impression of being a mediterranean house which is very popular nowadays in our country. This may be due to warmer weather caused by global warming process and the latin temperament that appeals to people living here.

Using bricks from a building pulled down we have intended to convey the feeling that our house is part of a process between the past and the future. The variety of materials that we have used symbolizes that the house has a history of development; in addition to the three conventional space dimensions of width, height and depth, we have aimed to show a fourth dimension: time.

I am using in my description the plural pronoun „we” because in my opinion a good family house is always the common project of both the architect and his client.

Adam Gyurkó, architekt

Photograph by: Ádám Gyurkó