Armuth Miklós - Lőrinczi Zsuzsa (szerk.): A Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem Történeti Campusa (Budapest, 2023)

A Könyvtár épülete - The Library Building Gy. Balogh Ágnes

we included 11 storeys (of which five would be built later), and they are built to be able to bear a moving load of 1600 kg per level and m2. The foyer is covered with ribbed Romanesque cross-vaults. Here the ribs were made of dry-pressed bricks, and are naturally left unplastered. The vaults are laid from ordinary brick and common limemortar. The infill is 15 cm thick. The roofs as well as the clock-tower a re made of wood. The cornices, frames and wall corners on the elevations are clad in skin-colour, dry-pressed brick, whereas the smooth wall sur- 1 4 8 faces are simply plastered, only the heavily loaded structures and those most exposed

to the harmful effects of the weather are made of hard carved stone. The gates of the

O

f building and the furniture in the reading room are of oak. The total costs of the build-j ing come up to 800.000 Crowns. P. S." (Pecz Samu)

„ In his autobiography written in 1920 Pecz describes the building in details. He men£ tioned his previous works that were helpful now, such as the designs of the National

k Archives, as well as his study tours and experiences related to the construction of

CD- stores. Comparing the store-part with other store structures which had only iron-frame

ceilings or vaults, he conctuded that the library of the University of Technology was safer H than the former regarding fire-protection, and also more favourably lit than the latter.

He also wrote about the reasons why he chose a polygonal ending for both the store wing and the reading hall instead of a more economical straight-line one. He argued that this design was more suited to the slanting position of the buildings in relation to the site border. Pecz was an expert in medieval structures, and excellently knew the potentials of materials as well as the laws of statics. This is how he described the vaulting of the reading halt in his autobiography: 'The reading hall for students is roofed with a genuine fan-vautt with an arch of 16.50 metres, and the masonry is made of common bricks, inctuding the ribs. As far as I know this is the largest arched fan-vault to exist, as of the ones built before this Wladislav [in Hungarian: Ulászló] hall in Prague had the largest one, but even that had an arch only 16 m wide. (...) I have calculated and scaled every detail of the vaulting in the large reading hall and those of the buttresses in a graphostatic way [meaning: geometrical drafting]. This is what boosted the designer's self-confidence and courage to declare, as opposed to the contractor master builder - who in the construction journal stated that he woutd take no responsibility for the durability of the vault - the designer expressedty asked and instructed to build the vaulting from brick strictly foltowing the plans." As a result, the 26-metre Long vautt system was built from bricks, for financial reasons too. Pecz received a price list from an R-C company to execute it from reinforced concrete,