The city of Sándorfalva invited Budapest-based Paradigma Ariadné architecture studio to design a buffalo barn and an educational trail into their natural protected land that today is wholly covered with reeds. The initial aim of the development was to immigrate buffalos to the place. This act has two outcomes. On one hand, visitors would have the chance to visit the trail and meet these creatures in their living environment. On the other hand, buffalos will recultivate the area by destroying the invasive reeds with their presence and turn the place back into its original pre-industrialized age condition, into a lake and swamp again which can welcome hundreds of native species that were away thanks to the lack of open water surface.
While it was a design task on one hand, it was also a task to reinterpret the built environment in a natural landscape on the other.
Concept wise this project is about the understanding of agricultural buildings of the Eastern European landscape through the time of history. These buildings in the countryside are still a mixture of almost a hundred years old regional architecture and contemporary industrialized technologies that qualities sometimes clashed together in a very naïve way. At the same time, both kinds of architecture include big and straightforward geometries, that create unique character in the landscape.
We tried to continue this quality with joyful geometrical composition in an organized way. We have defined a 500 meters long curved path with a 500-meter radius, on which we placed a few objects for observing nature: one buffalo barn, three little installations to enjoy the landscape through framing it, and a viewpoint at the end. Thanks to the giant curved shape of the path these objects can be revealed in a direct order for the visitors, while the whole structure can be observed only from the viewpoint.
