The project brief was to design an open but sheltered marketplace in a small town in countryside Hungary. The budget was very low, yet the local administration wanted a covered floor space as big as possible. The previous traditional style design proposal was totally revised and re-worked from scratch creating a unique approach to the Southern Hungarian way of building roofing. The result is a fusion of contemporary warped surfaces and rows of local traditional roofs. The new marketplace is now flourishing!
SOUTH REGION, HUNGARY
marketplace
Besides its original purpose as a market, the building was designed to be a local social hub, an event location in the second place. Therefore, the number of pillars were reduced to the minimum while preserving wide spans.
The starting point of the concept was a single unit – raster of a basic lean-to roof. Loads, spans and materials were optimized to the budget and the program on this single unit. Later the model of the unit – as a building block for the bigger whole – was twisted and arrayed to match required programmatic scale and to correspond with the traditional silhouettes of vernacular architecture.
“It resembles geometrically to a hyperbolic paraboloid, a warped surface that is still only constructed of straight pieces of timber.”
PRINCIPAL DESIGNER
Csaba Babud
Laszlo Babud
DEVELOPMENT NAME
Kiskunmajsa Town Market
LOCATION
Kiskunmajsa, Hungary
PROJECT STATUS
Completed
PROJECT STAGES
Concept Design to Construction
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mate Szabo