Municipal Swimming Pool, Balatonfüred

Architect: Tamás Varga
Text: Sándor Pálfy
Photos: Tamás Szentirmai, Tamás Fegyverneky 

Appearing in the neighbourhood of slightly sloping vineyard hills, the covered complex of a swimming-pool and a hotel in Balatonfüred is a unique one owing to the natural organic way as it grows out of its environment. from its local materials. Considering a built block of these scales and dimensions, it is a genuinely significant achievement of architecture today. The most striking means of natural architectural behaviour in this environment are the perfect insertion of the house into the terrain and using locally found stones as building materials. Regarding the latter, I think using the natural rocks as quarry gabion structure is a genuine architectural hit, which lends the buildings a work-of-art-like appearance nestling into their surroundings in the landscape north of Lake Balaton. The basic formula of the new facility is formed by two closed „stone blocks” that open only toward each other entirely, and to a lesser extent, along the sides of the hotel rooms facing north. The homogeneity and closed character of the stone blocks reinforce the Corten steel structures appearing on the surfaces, and the large glass expenses and the light-weight balconies along the sides of the hotel are the means of their opening up. The plaza created in-between the two stone blocks shares the scales of the streets: facing Lake Balaton, it creates an urban situation and offers shades as shelters for visitors in the hot summer weather. The large glass expanses provide transparency besides views into the insides of the two blocks from the street and thus allow for the organic co-existence of the two parts.

General architecture: V.T. Arch Kft.
Architect: Tamás Varga DLA
Structure: Béla Bősze
HVAC: András Bokor
Electrical engineering: Judit Balázs
Water technology: Balázs Tuzson
Kitchen technology: Dr. Józsefné Nagy
Landscape: Borbála Salgó, Dániel Kontra
Roads, public utilities: Sándor Farkas