Water Sports World Championship Budapest, 2021

Concept, design and text: Marcel Ferencz

Hungary is hosting the water sports world championships in 2017 for the juniors and the adults in 2021. Rated as the third most prestigious sports events of the world today, the Hungarian committee organizing the races chose the Danube bank as the best venue for these occasions. They had a vision, a dream of a strategic ring including three facilities, Császár-Komjádi és Hajós-Széchy swimming pools and a new complex to be built near Dagály lido near Margaret Island. In Budapest significant bath buildings have been built along springs by the Danube faultline throughout history at an even pace. At the meeting point of the natural spectacle and the urban spatial wall the function of baths has always represented some kind of a transcendental, down-to-earth quality in the past, which they shall go on to represent in the future – if not via architecture, then by evoking the intangible via the pattern of heat-dazed archimage. Holding onto the image of the intangible and incomprehensible, the complex functional spatial order must stand on its feet with a single momentum and sweeping energy to be able to elevate the city above the level of its ordinary everyday reality.

Client: Nemzeti Sportközpontok, Vígh László kormánybiztos
Project manager: Bozsó Roland
Leading architect: Marcel Ferencz DLA
Fellow architect: György Détári