The main building in Budakeszi út 51/E was inaugurated in late 1976; architect: Mária Siklós.
The renovation of our building 2019-2020
The renovation of the Film Archive’s headquarters began in 2019, and it will last until 2020. The renovation will enable the institution to operate with modern vaults, research facilities and workstations. For the time since the entire renovation, the work of the Film Archive is not interrupted, thus staff often carry out their work at temporary workstations.
April 2019 marked the handover of the first newly renovated areas of the Film Archive, namely the reception, the vestibule, the workstations, and the renovated plumbing unit, a new conference room, research rooms, and a client room for the deposit copy service. In addition, the new and advanced HVAC systems have been set up for the storage facilities that hold the deposit copies. The HVAC system ensures the environmental conditions according to the ISO standards for magnetic tapes.
The second phase started in May, 2019 for the office spaces, the renovation of plumbing units, the upgrade of the air conditioning system to an up-to-date HVAC system, and also the ex post insulation of the film storage room. During that time, the legacy basement mechanical engineering was eliminated, digitization capacity was replaced and a Machine Equipment Room (MER) was built to operate the IT equipment which was procured from the Public Collection Digitization Strategy (KDS) resource. The setup of clean rooms for handling films on the ground floor also took place, with regards to health and safety aspects which were also taken into account.
Along with that, there we had set up a sound insulated Oral history room with a control room for video- and audio recording. During the electrical design of the building, special care was taken to establish a LAN and optical network between the MER and the workstations.
In the first phase a 1035 square meter (11 140 square feet) space was renovated.
During the second phase of the renovation of the main building, the 1247 square meter (13 423 square feet) storage facility for our collection was also renovated. The first six months of 2019 were defined by the preparations for the handover of the working area, and that is why it was necessary to ensure the temporary relocation of certain contingents of our collection.