Post Office Building – Nyíregyháza-Sóstóhegy

Architect: István Lengyel
Text: Krisztián Dudics
Photos: Tamás Bujnovszky

A post office is a typical small-scale public building: it tends to be transparent, with scales easy to grasp, without being much too complex to meet permanent expectations concerning functions. For István Lengyel it could be a kind of routine task as two other post office buildings designed by him have already been completed with roughly the same dimensions in Nyírbátor and Újfehértó. The world of provincial towns in the Great Hungarian Plain in the eastern part of the country, which is an outer green belt zone of Nyíregyháza, must have been also a familiar location for him – concerning both the environmental typology and the social mentality. For this reason – and maybe because of the familiarity – Lengyel uses solutions he had rarely done before and this time designed a building with raw concrete surfaces. Being aware of the slovenly roughness of the environment, this project is regarded as an almost revolutionary act and has got consequences interpretable on two levels: both an aesthetic and a moral one.

Építész vezető tervező / leading architect: Lengyel István
Építész tervezők / architects: Barabás Lajos, Bartha Tibor,
Statika / structure: dr Nagy Tibor   (†2006)
Gépészet, közmű / installation, public utilities: Hámori Sándor
Elektromosság / electrical engineering: Rutkovszky László
Közlekedés / traffic: Dankó Károly
Megrendelő / client: Magyar Posta Zrt