Pilis Linen Visitors’ Centre, Pilisszentiván

Architects: Richárd Hőnich, Péter Nagy
Text: Miklós Okrutay
Photos: Norbert Juhász

In Pilisszentiván, on a site which was on lease back in those days, but later on was managed by the Duna-Ipoly National Park, there has been a visitors’ centre since 2004 which facilitates the spirit of conversationalism. The site itself is thus also provides the terrain and the potentials for this house which represents certain spitirual origins, even though it has no outstanding or remarkable exterior design. Opened to the public in autumn, 2020, the positioning of the renewed and extended Pilis Linen Visitors’ Centre is defined and explained by this: it is the culmination of a systematically built and developed process delaying with the limitations of the fact that it is located in the heart of the village and thus slightly farther away from the starting points of the educational trails. The asymmetrical bulk of the building is not gradually stepped to follow the tracery of the highly descending terrain, but responds to it with some unexpected dymanics of the backbone of the roof designed with a sloping axis. All this comes to rip out the house from the traditional architectural vocabulary of forms whilst also supporting its evolution to turn into a public building. Another means of this is the plankwood cladding applied extensively and comprehensively to integrate the composition, whilst the intimacy of the transparent interior spaces is guaranteed by their spatial limitations both in the offices in the loft and the open-closed community zone on the ground-floor.

Client: Duna-Ipoly Nemzeti Park Igazgatóság
General design: Építész Stúdió
Architects: Richárd Hőnich, Péter Nagy
Structure: Tetra Plan Kft.
HVAC: Mangel Épületgépész Iroda Kft.
Electrical engineering: Gráf Bt.
Main contractor: Szamikor Építőipari Kft.
Technical management: Eurout Kft.