Sustainable Building Energetics Demonstration Centre, Debrecen University

Architect: Marcel Ferencz
Text: Zorán Vukoszávlyev
Photos: Tamás Bujnovszky

Erected on the campus of the university of Debrecen, the new demonstration centre targets at the tangible, plain and reasonable with its proportions, whilst its forms represent the abstract, scientific and guessable. Human-scale proportions are matched with the spirit of research here. The perfect cube form as a base body was almost perfectly evenly divided into nine parts to create a group of spatial forms by architect Marcel Ferencz. This highly strict and regular order reflected in the horizontal plan is modulated vertically along the entire height, the closed and open spaces of the two-storey building are housed in the lower part of the cubic volume. Open to visitors, the research building houses demonstration rooms in the corners of the communal central space based on a Greek-cross plan with the same layout and height dimensions. The research basis is actually an engineering laboratory, but because of its public communications it also functions as a place for demonstration. The cube is an abstraction from the concept of the „building”, but its size understandably mediates the humanistic aspects of sustainable strategies.