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Mihály Balázs	Office headquarters	Buda, Hungary	December 1999
A transformation of the European urban courtyard type which should be inspiring throughout the region. Click on image to view larger version in new window
Matáv is Hungary’s biggest telecommunications company and has a large 1950s building in the middle of Buda. To convert it to a modern headquarters, the architects glazed over the whole of the central courtyard while renovating the perimeter as offices – in fact, client and planners required the building’s exterior to be preserved as an important example of East European architecture of its period. It has been re-rendered, and completely re-organized internally, with the central corridor moved to the internal perimeter of the court, and the office spaces freed up. The move does of course help to emphasize the noble new glazed space as clearly the focus of the whole. It contains a new conference centre which is formed round a 400-seat auditorium. New volumes are contained under an abstracted landscape made of stone, glass and wood; it rises from plain to hill over the conference centre, with the entrance to the new spaces forming a sort of dark but welcoming cave in the blond surfaces. Above the new timber landforms, slender steel tree-like columns support the glass roof, through which the light of the heavens pours in. So what had been an unpleasant utilitarian courtyard, full of parking, deliveries, dankness and dirt has been transformed into an impressive semi-public space (parking, by the way, is now accommodated in an underground park under the entrance). It is always surprising how radically a poky, unpleasant urban space can be transformed by glazing it over. Here, there is poetry too. It ought to be an example for reworking all those dark and gloomy courtyards created by traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban planning under the often grey skies of northern and eastern Europe. Architect Mihály Balázs