Have a Vision for an Abandoned Building? Enter the Revitalizátor Contest!

This year’s Revitalizátor idea contest, seeking tourism-related solutions for the repurposing of brownfield sites and buildings that have lost their original function, has been announced also for BME students. The competition requires an architectural and engineering perspective, as well as economic thinking, and creative concepts for space utilization, so applications are being accepted from student teams of two or three members.

Revitalizátor is being organized for the fifth time this year by tourism think tank CheckINN, which operates under the umbrella of the Hungarian Tourism Association Foundation. Its goal is to promote tourism and innovative thinking among students in higher education, as well as to strengthen the industry connections of student ideas. As the call for entries states:

“A festival venue in an old factory or a museum in a former train station — every idea has a place here.”

According to CheckINN, no background knowledge of architecture or tourism beyond what students already know is required to apply.

Although about 40 BME students have already participated in the competition over the past four years and one of them has even been a member of a winning team, this is the first time the organizers have officially invited the BME, alongside the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and the University of Pécs.

Entries are open until May 25; participants must submit a creative video of no more than 2 minutes introducing their team and the selected location. The top 10 teams will advance to the second round, where the task is to develop an innovation strategy of up to 20 pages detailing the tourism, economic, and technical/architectural aspects of the concept. The teams will be supported in developing their ideas by two architectural and two tourism experts acting as mentors during three 60-minute sessions, and a presentation coach will also help them prepare on one occasion.

In the final round, teams must present their ideas in a 5-minute session with live feedback from the jury. The jury will include Tamás Varga, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at BME. The creators of the two entries judged to be the best will each receive a net scholarship of 1 million forints.

The call for entries can be found here; if you are looking for a teammate, click here, and you can apply here.

Rector’s Office, Communications Directorate