Detail of the project ed. 2016

church-of-st-mar­­garet / Erdé­lyi + Partner

Design­er	Bal­azs, Erdelyi
Loca­tion	Tapol­ca, Veszprém coun­ty, Hungary
Design Team	Bal­azs Erdelyi Balint Erdelyi
Year	2011
Pho­to credits	All pho­to cred­its by Balint Erdelyi

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

Church in the new cemetery
I have long been – at least since my stud­ies in the Fran­cis­can sec­ondary school of Szen­ten­dre – inter­est­ed in redefin­ing the ancient archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments by using mod­ern means and mate­ri­als. My aim at dis­play­ing the inner tran­scen­den­tal need of peo­ple that con­nects a com­mu­ni­ty to its ances­tors, past, future, after­life and God. The cen­tral build­ings of the new pub­lic ceme­tery in Tapol­ca, includ­ing the funer­al par­lor and the church designed by me, rep­re­sent the place of tran­si­tion after death. Inten­tion­al­ly I cut emp­ty clichés, mate­ri­als and col­ors of the anti-cler­i­­cal era. I con­sid­ered „life” as „the­ater” and „direct­ed the last scene of the last act” to resolve the per­son­al and com­mu­nal tragedy. The lay­out of the space is based on the con­cept of ear­ly Hun­gar­i­an church archi­tec­ture. Cen­­tral­ized-plan and round church­es were typ­i­cal in the ear­ly ages, while the east-west axis of the sacred space and the south fac­ing entrance were the main char­ac­ter­is­tics of Romanesque churches.
Domes in archi­tec­ture have a spe­cial role, they empha­size spaces, ampli­fy cul­ture, reli­gion or rep­re­sen­ta­tive func­tions. There­fore, a new dome is a spe­cial achieve­ment of archi­tec­ture and tech­nol­o­gy, it rede­fines the build­ing prin­ci­ples of past sim­i­lar structures.
Brunelleschi built the dome of the San­ta Maria del Fiore with a spe­cial brick­lay­ing process. He only used a cylin­dri­cal rib­bing with­out any sup­port or scaf­fold­ing for the new­ly built struc­ture, as if the new dome was built float­ing in the air. He put trans­ver­sal bricks inside the lon­gi­tu­di­nal­ly layed rows of build­ing blocks, which then held brick arch­es like book­ends. The same prin­ci­ple was applied in the struc­ture of the church’s dome in Tapolca.
The man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the Duratherm sys­tem made it pos­si­ble for every ele­ment to be shaped to pre­cise dimen­sions and angles to fit their exact location.
The con­struc­tion cost of the church was borne by the chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty of the town.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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