Car Park, Sopron

Architect: Zoltán Tima
Text: Levente Móré
Photos: Tamás Bujnovszky

What sort of architectural gestures can be used to make a certain building type, the car park, which today has a very poor prestige, more acceptable? Zoltán Tima and his colleagues at KÖZTI have answered this question with a building of austere structure, but at the same time of excellent proportions, whose façade carries a remarkable meaning. Zoltán Tima, Tamás Németh and Kaplony Tölgyesi built a much-needed new parking garage for the city on the periphery of Sopron’s Castle District, in a highly heterogeneous environment, mostly with architectural features dating from -the 1970s and 1990s. It was necessary to de-congest the Castle District, and in particular the boulevard in front of the inner city wall, which runs along the outer edge of the former moat. From the viewpoint of urban planning, their work can therefore be seen as an intellectual continuation of the first phase of the regeneration project, which was completed in 2015 and supervised by Studio Seven. The five-storey, semi-offset, 2.6 metre interior height building can accommodate 235 cars, 26 motorcycles and 10 bicycles, designed with convenient ramps and continuous one-way traffic. Even more interesting and striking, however, is the uniform façade cladding covering the entire exterior surface of the building like a shroud, with 75% vertical slats made of glazed terracotta clay ceramic elements fixed to a steel structure. The optical enclosure is broken only by the slit-like ground floor openings on the south-facing side, thus defining the entrances to the building. Behind the ceramic roof, which also provides ventilation, an extensive green roof has been created on the south end slab of the translucent, uniform ferroconcrete structure, while the northern end is completely open, including the upper parking level.

Architecture: KÖZTI, Dob60 Ltd.
Leading architect: Zoltán Tima
Architect: Tamás Németh
Project leader: Kaplony Tölgyesi
Fellow architects: J. Tibor Molnár, István Boda, Zsófia Gönczöl, Róbert Koch, Péter Korda – Dob60 Ltd.
Structure: Gábor Schreiber
Fire protection: János Mészáros
Framework: Imre Gurubi, Ádám Becker – KÖZTI
HVAC: Szilárd Szakál, János Réti – KÖZTI
Electrical engineering: András Máramarosi, András Ritzl – KÖZTI
Accessibility: Bernadett Babits
Garden, landscape: Sándor Mohácsi, Fanni Balogh – S73 Ltd.
Public utilities: Ádám Szabó
Traffic: László Freiler