MOME Campus

The MOME Campus expansion plans posed an interesting challenge: how to connect to the artist László Moholy-Nagy (after whom the university is named), a great innovator who pushed the artistic and technical boundaries, and through his person to the early-twentieth-century Bauhaus movement. The answers to the above questions helped us to plan the indoor and outdoor spaces and how they relate to each other; meanwhile Moholy-Nagy‘s experiments involving the effects of light provided inspiration for the outer shell of the buildings and for the indoor lighting. The sharp and the blurred; the varying depth of focus; the randomness that comes with analogue techniques; and the circumvention of inscribed methods – all these served as points of reference for the concept. The axis connecting the buildings – in an almost east-west alignment – forms the spine of the complex. Though powerfully delineated, there is also transparency: the atriums at both ends mean there is no visual obstacle. The original plan by Zoltán Farkasdy was for three buildings, constructed according to the scheme B–A–C. However, the third one (C) was never built. Thus building A in itself is asymmetrical, though the three together would have been symmetrical. By following Farkasdy’s concept of the three buildings lying on the same coordinate system, the original plan becomes balanced at the cognitive level. As for the functional division, we placed the learning centre in the building closest to the city. Administration and MA courses were placed in building A; and BA courses were put in building B. In the centre of the complex, the so-called “Heart of MOME” was created – a space that unifies the separate buildings and spaces into an organic campus. Underground at the Heart is the pulsating centre where everything comes together, forming the main community meeting point.