House with a Hundred Rooms -
MTK Football Academy

Year ︎  2018
Outcome ︎ Proposal
Location ︎ Budapest
Team ︎ Lilla Árkovics, Bernadett Csendes, Attila Róbert Csóka, Szabolcs Molnár, Mátyás Herkli,
Dávid Smiló

Publications ︎ Archdaily, Forbes, We Love Budapest, ARQA

Our proposal to the new building complex of MTK football academy with its almost hundred rooms is the representation of progression as the objective of a football academy is to provide the institutional background of children development and progression in football and sport. Therefore we decided to design a building which is able to express the common idea behind the notion of development in its very spatial structure instead of using fashionable architectural tools to express wealth and elegance.

Only one corridor belongs to the house - without any hierarhic service routes - which on standard  state is a 1.5-meter-wide passage, but where it is needed it can expand to six-meter-wide halls and become a gym, restaurant and common space. This 434-meter-long enormous space organizing all the rooms and functional needs within the building while on one hand solving many regular problems, like accessibility and shortening all fire escape routes and provide unique interior on the other.

As most of the plans made us are cultural statements at the same time The House with a Hundred Rooms is also not a building without theoretical context. It has roots in vernacular architecture. In the house of Hungarian (and the most European nations) peasants house the numbers of rooms connected by one corridor always represented the role of the owner in the society. More rooms mean more agricultural function in one building which mean more wealth.

The richer you were the longer house you had. But the main meaning of the peasants house lies in its possibility to be extended if an extension were needed. This were also the possibility to social mobility expressed in a spatial form and a possibility to progression. This is the nature of the peasants house which we borrowed and used it to a completely different purpose while the meaning of progression still remains.

The proposal is not simply a cultural statement but a unique idea to give accessibility to the football and exercise fields from every single dressing rooms and apartments in 10 meters. Or a solution to speed up the implementation of a building. As the House with a Hundred Rooms has only one level without basement the procession of its building takes only one construction phase. No pauses needed during the construction.