Two-semester cooperation between the Department of Residential Building Design, Faculty of Architecture, BME and the Municipality of Tatabánya

Text: Tamás Varga

The competition in the educational market, the struggle for students day by day, semester by semester, academic year by academic year, sets the instructor a serious task to attract more and more talented students to a design course, to raise the quality of education and to train architects at the most prestigious university and faculty of the country. Following the renewal of the architectural education, since the introduction of the two-cycle education, the design assignments of the upper fourth- and fifth-year students have been mostly carried out within the framework of real-life relationships with the Department of Residential Building Design and municipalities in Hungary. The new teaching method, applied in successive semesters, of exploring with our students the location, scale and function of the necessary interventions in municipalities with real problems, has proven to be effective.
We have taken the project-based design teaching framework to a whole new dimension in the Department of Residential Building Design during the autumn and spring semesters of the last academic year. The Municipality of Tatabánya has started an urban development strategy to exploit the untapped housing potential of the city. The aim of this strategy is to provide technical guidance to underpin urban policy decisions on housing development: enhancing local identity and community building, building a social and rental housing programme, innovation-incubation-infrastructure development, and keeping young people in the area. In addition to the housing development strategy, it has become equally important to identify, locate and plan for the missing and needed community functions in the municipality. The project-based educational method used in this cooperation has made it possible to bring together education-research partnerships, which has been a major source of inspiration for all those involved in the planning courses at the university and a guide for the municipality in formulating and achieving its long-term objectives.