Kós Károly Vocational School, Érd

Architects: Katalin Csillag, Zsolt Gunther
Text: Tamás Kiss
Photos: Balázs Danyi

Over the past 50 years, the city of Érd has developed by leaps and bounds. While in 1970 the settlement was a village, in 1979 it was rated as a town. The renovation of the buildings housing Károly Kós Vocational School was a necessary stage of this development. In 2016, a design competition was launched and the winning design was submitted by 3H Architects. Katalin Csillag and Zsolt Gunther designed a new complex, significantly increasing floor space with functional groups next to the main building built in the early 1970s to form an integral unit with the old structure, and the parts of which completed in the first stage have already been occupied by the students. The architects first took stock of the heritage of the area: the main building, with its red clinker brick cladding, was considered to be of conservation value, whilst the other inorganically linked annexes and outbuildings were demolished. The simple, brick-clad, L-shaped flat-roofed building embodied architectural value. Its original character was the starting point for the complex geometric volumes and use of materials within the new architectural composition. The southern wings of the whole new addition have been completed so far. This includes a spacious auditorium with staffroom and office space on the upper floor, connected on both sides by spacious roofed courtyards on different levels. Connected to this from the west there is a gymnasium under the roofed yard.

Client: Municipality of Érd
Leading architects: Katalin Csillag, Zsolt Gunther
Project architect: Ádám Farkas
Fellow architects: Dorottya Garay-Kiss, Veronika Novák, Júlia Boromissza, Tamás Csépke,Anna Sára Kiss, Petra Reményi, Tommaso Laezza, Sarolta Rab, Krisztina Tari
Structure: Balázs Puskás – Terraplan’97
HVAC: Zoltán Gróza – Körös Consult
Public utilities: Etele Nagy – Körös Consult
Electrical engineering: Ferenc Kelemen – Kelevill-FZ
Fire protection: Bendegúz Csuba – OPTOMM Engineering
Landscape: Enikő Kapás – Departer
Environment protection: Ervin Kanász-Szabó – Akusztika Engineering
Acoustics: Éva Borsiné Arató – Arató Acoustics
Roads, traffic: Miklós Wettstein – Wettstein & Co.
Kitchen technology: Piroska Kaszab – Kende Gastro
Sports technology: Mihály Budai