Reformed Student Home located in Pápa

  • Prize
    Honorable Mention in Architectural Design / Educational
  • Design Company
    Bivak Studio
  • Lead Designer
    Áron Vass-Eysen, Tamás Máté
  • Architecture Firm
    BIVAK studio
  • Construction Company
    Pesti Építö Zrt.
  • Photo Credit
    Yanep Lust
  • Project Location
    Pápa, Hungary
  • Client
    Transdanubian Reformed Church District
  • Project Date
    2023

"During the reform era (1830-1848), Pápa was a late baroque looking city...renowned for its fairs and more than a thousand artisans...The center of the city's intellectual hub was the Reformed College, hence, Pápa was also named the Athens of the Transdanubian region."

The exciting feature of Pápa, a city with an artisanal-eclectic ambiance, is that you can see the accumulation of time on its buildings. The new student home, with its mass and plaster architecture, blends into the continuity of the cityscape. In its colour scheme and window design, the building evokes the late-baroque aesthetic of the reform-era city center but rewrites it with contemporary architectural solutions.

Each room has its bay window, which functions as both a characteristic element of the exterior and a piece of furniture in the interior for relaxing and studying. We found the inspiration for this idea while strolling the streets of Pápa, and we redesigned the city's historical bay windows into a gradable dormitory scale. To the outside, these windows show that the rooms as spaces for personal development are tuned to light and clarity.