Project
Client
No clientWhy Unrealised
No clientTypology
CultureLocation
Budapest, HungaryProject Year
2007Project Size
66000 m2Workhours
100
// COLLECTION STATUS // PROJECTS = 103 / SQUARE METERS ± 4.565.548 / COST IN NOK ± 29.809.500,00
Project ID#174
Chose Picture
Anna Szőnyi
House of Climates
Architectural shapes never seen before meet functions never invented before. Tropics and climates, storms and placid winds are set to date in the House of Climates, intended to become something of a weather-museum.Anna Szőnyi is a recent graduate of the architecture faculty at Moholy-Nagy University of Fine Arts, Budapest (formerly known as University of Applied Arts). Her diploma piece, the House of Climates was inspired by architectural reflections on climate-change. Global warming has doomed earth’s various climatic zones to disappear, together with their specific characters, and the human notions connected to them. The House of Climates is destined to preserve them. There are no objects in this museum, only spaces capable of arousing emotions and sensations. Not only weather, but setting can also be modeled in its halls. Nature becomes palpable, changing biosphere becomes an experience to be lived.
The choice of location is at once symbolic and remarkable: the lot is on the edge of Budapest downtown, between the future Government Quarter and the historic Western Railway Station.
The spaces of the House of Climates divide to different zones. Walking out from the direction of downtown we leave the hottest climates until we reach the coolest ones. Perpendicular to this, is the range of precipitation. The House of Climates consists of two kinds of spaces: outdoor spaces are in the confines of the building but they have no roof: mainly continental climates are shown here. Extreme climates not reconcilable with Budapest’s microclimate are modeled indoors: here we find the hottest, the coolest, the most humid and the driest zones.
For the construction of The House of Climates, Szőnyi chose extraordinary architectural tools. The lot is 220 meters wide and 300 meters long, adding up to a total of sixty-six thousand square meters. The body to be built is of a twofold nature: it is positively a block from the distance, from where the silhouette made up of a long series of successive screens looms like a cubic body, but it becomes immaterial if you go closer to find the parallel screens penetrable, refusing to assemble into a façade. The double stressed skin of the inner space covered with EFTE-foil runs perpendicularly to this thick comb of screens as a fluid mass. The body of the building is dissolved, vanishing in thin air, making the expansion of the inner space stressed only by the lack of supporting elements. This intensive play with the space results in the disappearance of visual borders, the dissolution of the traditional hierarchies organizing inner and outer spaces.
The House of Climates is an autonomous complex, almost as an organism. It feeds partly on energy produced by herself, and partly on a range of natural energy-resources, living in a constant, lively interaction with what it is supposed to showcase.
website: http://www.hg.hu/cikk/a_museum_of_weather
30.10.07
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