Exquisite monograph showcases key Budapest architects 3h – and captures a changing capital - English

When architectural team 3h came to Budapest from their practice in provincial Győr in 2006, they had one major international contract under their belts and an eclectic CV. Since then, among many stellar projects, they have been behind the stunning rebuild of the MOME campus and helped remodel historic Pannonhalma Basilica. Reconfiguring the Király Baths is still ongoing. Marking 15 years in Budapest, 3h has produced an exquisite monograph, ’Spaces of Intensity’, a fully illustrated overview in English of their work. We meet 3h co-founder Zsolt Gunther to outline plans past, present and future.

When talking about contemporary architecture, it’s hard to avoid starchitecture, star architects making brash iconic statements. Ripples of the Bilbao effect have been felt way beyond the grey waters of the Nervión.

And yet starchitecture is what 3h does, in fact, avoid. Named after a fine type of pencil basic to their trade, headed by the same husband-and-wife team of Zsolt Gunther and Katalin Csillag who met at Budapest’s Technical University, 3h operates from a modest office at Corvin-negyed, accessed by a vintage lift within a refined, fin-de-siècle apartment building common to inner Pest.

Here, a team of 20 creates clear, practical yet challenging architecture, for office workers, university students and children with physical disabilities to carry out their daily lives in pleasurable spaces. Churchgoers, gallery visitors and swimmers across Hungary all benefit from services, exhibitions and active recreation while bathed in natural light, appreciating a greater sense of the place around them.

For 15 years in Budapest and 27 in Hungary, more than 50 projects have been drawn up by that trusty 3h pencil. With the company’s Budapest anniversary falling on 1 May, 3h has combined with specialist Basel-based publishers Birkhäuser to create an imaginative monograph, opening a window onto the firm’s far-reaching oeuvre.

Not since the great Imre Makovecz, and never before him, has a single monograph been dedicated by a prestigious foreign publisher to a single Hungarian architect or architectural team.

Presented entirely in English, Spaces of Intensity comprises a comprehensive series of picture essays, essays and detailed outlines of 14 projects.

Changing Budapest

“We wanted to put architecture in context,” begins 3h co-founder Zsolt Gunther, “our architecture and the architecture that inspires us, and how it changed the city. Gaps and spaces in the urban landscape offered potential. Since the early 2000s, more money came into the city, focusing the attention of business”.

Zsolt and his wife Katalin Csillag first began in Győr as both also had working ties to nearby Graz, and they played no part in Budapest’s brash rebuilding immediately after 1989.

Brave, however, they most certainly were. Tasked with building a forum for luxury car company Audi in Győr, the team turned to the signature form of its TT Roadster model, in bright poppy red.

A double ramp leads onto the roof for cars to be displayed, while presentations and performances are staged in the multifunctional space below. 3h had put down a marker, the vehicle being one of the world’s most recognisable brands.

Smaller housing projects, meanwhile, forced 3h to find creative solutions within tight budgets and regulations – disciplines which would serve them well further down the road.

After moving to Budapest, the next major commission was an unusual one. The Archabbey at Pannonhalma dates back to 996, a century after the foundation of Hungary itself.

Teaming up with top UK architect John Pawson CBE – known for his bridges at Kew Gardens and flagship stores for Calvin Klein – 3h collaborated in a major renovation of one of the nation’s most revered buildings.

Still the domain of Benedictine monks, Pannonhalma Basilica was reinterpreted in line with their daily order, the use of onyx and rearranged lighting underlining a long medieval heritage with minimal intervention, a laudable 3h trait.

The Pannonhalma effect

As Zsolt explains, “Pannonhalma was a turning point for our company – a sophisticated design within a medieval setting and a focus on the use of materials. We gained a reputation for working with historical monuments”.

The next was as iconic as Pannonhalma. The Cathedral in Szeged not only dominates the city’s main square but is a symbol of its recovery after the Great Flood of 1879, and the backdrop for its famous summer festival.

Here, 3h added their own layers with trademark understated ornamentation. To illustrate the point, Zsolt brings out a single heavy block from the tiling used for the altar, each restrained decorative element, painstakingly researched from Hungarian folkloric sources, fashioned by expert blasts of a high-pressure waterjet.

Past and contemporary aligned

“We strengthen the presence of the past to create something essentially contemporary,” is how Zsolt describes their method.

A café area at the bottom of the 13th-century Dömötör Tower, a visitor centre, a steel staircase that is also the continuation of the material used for the parapet, and underground entrances, all the new features follow a thin line between past and present.

Their most recently completed monumental project was the new picture gallery and exhibition extension of Esterházy Castle in Fertőd, recreating Baroque and Rococo in contemporary form, a seamless continuation from 1784 to 2014, meeting 21st-century needs.

Not pigeonholed by history, 3h also took on major urban commissions in the city where they had relocated in 2006, Budapest. Here, the challenges were different.

Budapest, a city divided

“The topology of Budapest is paramount, the city divided by the Danube, which is present in a way that isn’t the case in Prague, giving Buda and Pest their distinct characters.”

Among the stand-out commissions in the capital – the Geometria Office Building near the Danube in Buda, the three-fingered K4 Office Building amid the busy traffic on Váci út in Pest – one towers above the rest: the MOME Campus.

Here, history underscored the project in a different, more personal way. Named after Hungarian Bauhaus pioneer László Moholy-Nagy, the nation’s most prestigious university of art and design dates back to 1880, one of Europe’s top educational institutions in the field.

Creativity and innovation are paramount. Here Ernő Rubik produced the first designs for his famous Cube, and here Zsolt Gunther completed his own doctoral studies.

The original plans for the MOME campus were created back in the 1950s by his teacher and mentor Zoltán Farkasdy, whose east-west axis was kept in place, augmented by the new UP Innovation Centre aimed at liberating creativity.

The MOME complex may attract some of Hungary’s most elite students yet its surrounding parkland and regular exhibitions remain open to the public, linking it to other places of education created by 3h with social integration in mind. Special schools in Csorna and Koroncó were among the earliest works in the company portfolio.

The current reconstruction and extension of Budapest’s historic Király Baths must number among the most demanding of undertakings carried out by the team. One of the original thermal spas built according to refined Ottoman tradition in the later 1500s, the bathhouse later had Baroque and Classicist makeovers.

To create a contemporary one, 3h again makes best use of natural light, as their Turkish counterparts would have done more nearly half a millennium ago. The signature octagonal shape of the central pool is echoed in stone furnishings elsewhere. As in Győr, Pannonhalma and Szeged, no detail is left to chance, no historical reference unnoticed.

With so many high-profile commissions under their belts, still headed by the same couple who started the company nearly three decades ago, 3h continues to take on new projects and work within limitations of budget and logistic.

As Zsolt concludes: “Clients sometimes may have something else in mind – it’s like a couple, there are quarrels and there is compromise. We understand we have to meet the needs of every client. Most of all, there is dialogue”.