Leisure Garden and Pavilions

Camp leader: Balázs Juhász

Our feelings and the events forming our community were maybe more important than what we eventually built. The joy of building, the magic of communal work have a more determining role than the architectural power of the finished buildings. This is not the belittlement of our works, it rather expresses our need to be able to build for each other and for the act of building itself.

The idea was born with the leadership of Chief Arpad High School of Sárospatak: to transform the schoolyard into a garden which is worthy of the spirit and the building of the school, which was designed by Imre Makovecz. The source of Attila Turi’s plan was a meditative essay by Makovecz which marked out the location for the pavilion and the covered trellis. Saint Elisabeth was born in Sárospatak, and she was also called the Star of Sárospatak. This became the Leitmotif for me when imagining the mass and form creating power of the future building.

During the implementation we felt that it was not only forty different people moving about in the schoolyard but a collective consciousness was actually melting us into one single unity, as if we were the forty fingers of an invisible creature. Maybe this is the spirit that really brings buildings alive and raises the work onto the level of creation, and also deepens the love we feel for each other, the love we kept receiving from our hosts. The gratitude and acknowledgement we got from them gave a new meaning to the not easily defined notion of architecture.

Balázs Juhász