Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) Development of Campus and Creative Innova-tion Knowledge Park

When planning the expansion of the MOME Campus, we were faced with the question of identity: on the one hand, finding connections to the person it’s named after - someone with a creative nature of innovation, pushing artistic and technical boundaries - and through him, to the pioneering applied arts movement of the previous century, the Bauhaus. On the other hand, in the educational activities at the university, apart from the carefully crafted professional knowledge of applied arts, the complexity of thinking, the development of conceptual skills and the recognition of real problems also play an increasingly important role. These two trajectories of identity defined the planning space we worked in. Moholy-Nagy’s experiments in light, the sharp and the blurred, the shifting depth of focus and the randomness arising through analogue techniques were a source of inspiration when designing the outer shell and interior lighting conditions of the knowledge centre All buildings have their own individual inner world. The suspended structure of Building BASE allows the ground floor of the building to visually open up to its surroundings without any barriers. The building’s three inner reinforced concrete cores bear the load of the suspended floors. The post-tensioned girders under the roofing convey the suspension to the cores. When shaping the new space of Building MA, we practically turned the original building inside out and the previously enclosed spaces were reconfigured into an open spatial structure, which connects the three levels of the building in a vertical as well as a horizontal sense. The inner, inspirational world of the UP building and the system of spirally traversed apertures are based on human movement: offering different cross-views from every position. As the building complex was established over a longer period of time, it has an openly heterogenous appearance, yet the applied solutions are conceptually related. The vertically oriented columns of Building MA serve as a point of departure and this vertical rhythm is the basis of the banded façade of Building BASE and the transparent shell of the innovation centre of UP. The UP building’s facade system reflects on the experiment in light of Moholy-Nagy, thanks to the continuous interplay of the depth of focus. All of this is accomplished in a way that the mathematically planned displacements of the cast glass panes on each level lend a sort of modern ornamentation to the building. As multiple factors are required for the creative work at the university’s institutes, we consciously shaped the spaces into an open system where surprise and the unexpected also play a role. This results in the experience of the elemental, the child-like wonder of our surroundings. The spaces and their diverse attributes facilitate the emphasis of creative nature: instead of approaching an object or a natural phenomenon through aesthetic or scientific considerations, our approach was to discover something special. In this sense, the spaces are sites of adventures which continuously force one to abandon the comfort zones of our thinking.