Our goal is to
gain advantage of the peripheral position of the brownfield site, which has
many disadvantages: our vision was to create an autonomous neighbourhood, which
has a perspective to become self serving both from a social and an energetic
point of view. Also, the project should have the potential to become an
exemplary environmental development in Central Europe. During the design of the
project we call WATERfactory – ECOcity, we had to consider the following issues
to hand in a feasible proposal:
-
determination of
national monuments to be reused, determination of the buildings’ new function;
-
the zoned
distribution of the designed functions
with regards to the requirements of sustainability, economical
feasibility, intimacy and isolation;
-
the division of
the functional mix (institutional and service functions, monuments, conference
centre and eco-functions, education and recreation) according to the 12/24-hour
usage patterns to avoid the ghost city effect;
-
the environmental
design of individual buildings, defining building footprints, building siting,
possibilities of natural ventilation, insolation, air movement;
-
design high
quality, vegetated open spaces not only to increase human comfort, but also to
provide for the future autonomy of the development;
-
the possible
development pattern for rehabilitating the Danube bank near the WATERfactory –
ECOcity as a future goal.
We intended to
design an exemplary eco-development, which tries to give an innovative answer
to the two greatest problem of the 21st century: climate change and excessive use
of natural resources. Our proposed design is based on the best management
practices and on the approach of up-to-date urban development expertise.
As in Hungary and
also in the Eastern-European region there are no similar progressive
developments, the WATERfactory – ECOcity has the possibility to become the
first urban development project of its kind. The long term success is also
supported by the introduced research and development facilities, which provide
the high standard, dynamic improvement of the technologies employed and also
the ECOcity itself.
The WATERfactory
– ECOcity would be the first to implement the most recently developed photo
bioreactor technology, which produces bio-fuel with the help of algae’s based
on photosynthesis. We introduced this system on the South façades of the office
buildings exposed to direct sunlight.
We achieved 1st price with our proposal at the
urban design competition.