The concept, which uses the farmyard as a “found object”, turned the existing school into a traditional, drive-through, farmhouse/courtyard-like building. The project also involves a return to the structure of the rural settlement, based on traditional, narrow, building plots with high density buildings – a contrast to the standalone buildings that have sprung up everywhere of late, but that – with their wasteful extravagance – are so alien to rural life.
The concept of the school and farmyard is closed, abstract and coherent, in keeping with the demands of contemporary culture and life. Among its essential spatial elements are the open spaces – covered and uncovered – that are well suited to the Hungarian climate; these continue and open up the mass of the building, the order of the traditional form.
The reinterpretation of tradition and its utilization in contemporary thinking are consistently to be found also in the use of materials, textures and colours. On the one hand, parallels are to be found between the brown of the façade recalling the earth, the roughness of the concrete mirroring the roughness of the untreated wood. On the other hand, a few elements – such as the empty doorways – stand in counterpoint to the traditional systems.
