At the 2019 Solar Decathlon house building global competition for university students (organised in Szentendre, Hungary), four prizes were awarded to the Hungarian Nest+ project, a model house designed by a consortium of the University of Pécs (Hungary), the University of Miskolc (Hungary) and the University of Algiers Blidai Saad Dahlad University (Algeria).
The "cube house" renovation was awarded 2nd place in the architectural category and 3rd place in the energy efficiency category, namely the design of a cost-effective passive building renovation with energy-efficient vernacular elements combined with complementary technological know-how.
Among the innovative technological features of the Hungarian Nest+, there are solutions and ideas such as: the Venturi tower, which is passed under the building and allows passive air exchange, summer cooling and winter warming of the building's rooms; the mobile solar space on the south side, which provides the building with energy as a solar shell in winter with its polycarbonate sliding wall; the mobile living spaces, which are freely combinable elements of the house for all types of installation, responding to different family sizes and structural family gaps; "smart" furniture made from recycled materials, or automatic building control systems that simultaneously control, monitor and analyse the building's functioning on the basis of given control instructions and learn the responses generated by the owner to different environmental impacts.
The model house is an innovative initiative for the renewal of this type of Hungarian building (the "Hungarian cube", or the so-called "Kádár-cube"), of which more than 800,000 have been built in Hungary mainly in the 1970s, and their renovation is becoming increasingly timely as they age.
