ÁRPÁD BRIDGE COACH TERMINAL

Árpád híd bus station was built as part of a 1980s transportation development concept as a traffic offload, for the lines departing from Budapest leading to the bend of the Danube and to North Hungary. We won the commission for this project in a closed competition of Volánbusz as an employee of BUVÁTI. The new building transacts a traffic of 20,000 people a day. As a young architect, it was a pretty big deal to design the first new public building. The buildings primary aim was slick and fast throughput organized along a clear symmetric axis. The service function area is located in the ‘L’ shaped solid wing while spaces for the travelling clientele occupy the two-storey glass box. The resulting mass is surrounded by the unique roof covering the entire length of the platform. Maybe it is worth mentioning, that under the material and structural deficient conditions of the 1980’s many structural details were built with a design technique which is unimaginable and unnecessary in terms of today. For example, the large glass wall was created by individually invented nodes due to lack of product constructions, manufactured by locksmith studios. As before the era of computer aided planning, our calculations only revealed their pertinence of whether we accurately calculated the size existing building after lifting the large steel structure in place. Fortunately, our calculations were correct. During the construction the slab above the ground floor was being built along with the columns. The framework was not proportioned for this kind of load so not much after the concrete casting the pallets broke and the concrete spilled all over the floor. It was a shocking sight to see the crying construction manager on the scaffolding as a young architect. We received the recognition of the Transport Minister for this building. As the city expands the traffic establishments grow out of the core. As of this notion the building was demolished in 2018 giving way to a new large-scale investment at Árpád híd. The building remains a memory, but we believe this is a natural occurrence in our profession.