The Dominican Sisters’ Monastery-Church Ensemble, Budakeszi

Építészek: István Bartók, Péter Fejérdy, Zsófia Lázár
Text: György Major
Photos: Balázs Danyi

In Budaörs, in the neighbourhood of the Baroque church and parish, next to the houses rising up the hill, stands the house of the Sisters’ of St. Dominic. At the mouth of the street that climbs up the hill, an unbroken mass of white buildings encloses the garden, functioning as a gateway to the upper parts. Above the almost homogeneous white lower wall sections, a dark band of monotonous square perforations leads through to the object-like ridge vents of the almost black sheet metal roof, gently sloping and enclosed by strict roof planes. Wall planes are punctuated from the direction of the street by an independent hopper door cut into the continuation of the light limestone of the plinth, a finely moulded upstairs window of an outbuilding and a narrow window opening onto the garden, interrupting the perforated end band. The two wings are connected by a bridge with vertical slits that continues the sheet metal cladding of the roof. Moving farther on the street, a richer architectural spectacle emerges, partly hidden behind the fence that emerges from the base of the volume, and partly in the mass of the gateway and the service space that forms the street extension behind it, which is also the foreground of the more mobile volume of the building. The two-storey street façade, with its two-storey wing emerging from the white walls of the street façade, which is structured with a more open pattern of openings, is the last components of the street corner. The chapel is accessible through a porch that repeats the open-covered space of the gateway. The whiteness of the walls and the ceiling, which takes over the shape of the roof, is only interrupted by the Baroque-style Kelheim stone floor, the stalls, the loose stain of the large wooden structure of the sanctuary, the reading stand, the stone block of the altarpiece and the oxidised copper ring of the tabernacle, the painted corpus of the cross, the limestone sculpture of the Stations of the Cross and the small gilded crosses, as well as the play of light and shadow filtering through the square openings of the perforated stone elements that cover the upper window.

Architecture: Fejérdy és Bartók
Concept: István Bartók, Aurél Benárd, Péter Fejérdy, Zsófia Lázár
Architects: István Bartók, Péter Fejérdy, Zsófia Lázár
Structure: Attila Hernád, Dániel Farkas – FaDa Ltd
HVAC: Kristóf Almay
Electrical engineering: Tamás Kollár
Lights: Ferenc Radnóczi
Fire protection: Áron Kerényi
Garden: Dániel Takács, Dorottya Varró – LArch Design
Kitchen technology: Pál Tamás Aczél – Coninvest
Elevator: Tamás Pölöskei
Main contractor: Merkbau Ltd
Technical supervisor: Nisus Ltd, Zsolt Kovács