Magocska Nursery, Csobánka

Architects: Gábor Bártfai-Szabó, Zoltán Horváth, Zsófia Hargitay
Text: Anna Zöldi
Photos: Benedek Bognár

In Csobánka, near Budapest, the municipality’s new crèche was built around a bend in a street, on a steep plot of land with typically ground-floor neighbours. The scale of the building blends in with the streetscape. Facing the street, the almost full width of the site forms a solid, but not enclosed, heavily glazed, wall, which, despite being a flat-roofed volume outside the gable-roofed form, is not alien to its surroundings. The character of the building clearly indicates a change of function among the village dwellings, with its installation creating a terraced roof on the hilltop. The result is a space and a building that is in keeping with the scale of its surroundings, which, although it refers back to the house that had stood there before, immediately makes the reference with the exaggerated proportions of the narrow window in the gable wall. The street façade of the flat wing, which is covered by an extensive green roof, gives a glimpse of the reception area of the two group rooms of the crèche with a glazed surface shaded by vertical louvres under a projecting cantilevered canopy.
Towards the street, the well-defined strong walls and glazed surfaces communicate with the public space, whilst towards the courtyard, blue and yellow plasterwork palette shows and separates the group rooms. Rounded nave windows are (also) placed at children’s eye level, private spaces created by breaking the angles of the walls, resonate with the kids’ inner world, and an irregular rhythm of window lay-outs on the lateral façade that projects the logic of the interior onto the walls bids farewell to those leaving the institution. The entire building is constructed with CLT panels, a pioneering, albeit gradually growing, technology.

Lead architects: Gábor Bártfai-Szabó, Zsófia Hargitay, Zoltán Horváth
Fellow architects: Júlia Farkas, Zsombor Papp
Structure: Dániel Merczel Dr
Accessibility: András Pandula
Fire protection: Béla Koloti
Electrical engineering: Zsolt Beharka
HVAC: Attila Tigyi
Landscape: Tibor Varga