Hunnish Bath

Location
Bodrogkleresztúr, Bodrog part
Size
150 m2
Client
Holland Rt.
Timeline
2000
plan
2001
foundation stone
2002
deadline
Status
Creation
Architectural team and design partners

„So That Old Manners Return…” „Hunnish Bath” on the Bank of Bodrog

The architect lives with vibrant, beautiful graphics, is independent, strong and indisputable in his abilities - a promise of a distinctive sound and individual form.

 

“… The house is rich in fine details due to its powerful shape: artistic fittings, precisely carved blocks of stone, unique turned metal disc fastenings on copper plate boards, handcrafted glass works blown in Zala.

The house also brings today's fashionable surface toys and montages of textures, but not as an editing principle, as a design goal, but only as a tool for detailing, edited in tectonic order. Disappearing is the architectural behavior that dresses (well-badly) houses with plaster architecture; and more materials are present in a work than ever before, but only through timeless materials and their hierarchical use can the building be balanced. Marcell Ferencz uses the materials very consciously: the stone, finely encrypting the noble material, as a powerful mass close to the ground, the brick in order, as a filling surface, the copper bottle as a military suit on the head - in triple order, with more and more elaborate elaboration.

Recessed in a sculpturesque way, the windows sit in a deep shadow resembling human glances. The design and the organization of the house bears marks of the light gesture of a talented hand. In a cheerful manner, just like a Hungarian dancing after glass of fiery wine. The architect uses sweeping and graceful graphics which is independent and powerful and indisputable in its own faculties – it is the promise of a charasteristic voice and individual form.
The spatial ordering of the waterhouse appears simple, the central bath area (with a common air space) is longitudinally accompanied by a communicating corridor with two entrances at its ends, alongside which the changing rooms, a sauna, the cellars of the sunbeds are strung like beads. Above the pool area, in the copper cope, the negative of a zikkurat collects and puffs out warm vapours. The lyrical graphic tracery of the glass window-eyes do not let in much light though – the playful bottles containing fragrant bathing oils stand ont he shoulder of a pool as cheerful as they do. The interior palette and the materials used here are reserved (with the dominance of white surfaces, some board patches of warmer tints, door panels of smoke-coloured glass without frame), the spatial design is animated and busy with details. As far as space concerned, a huge throne of rhyolite tuff comes to dominate topped with block stone bracket prepared for carving. Message, style and form are individual and staggering as a whole as well as seen separately, without any second thought behind them, and they are not heated by the gesture of revolution either. Construction is deliberate and hierarchic here. It is the trinity of concepts – talent, idea and the belief in one’s mission – embodied as homogeneous qualities – the continuity of paternal, inherited and chosen ideas which come to govern it.
(Ágnes KOVÁCS: Hun-fürdő a Bodrog partján. MÉ 2004/6.)