Plastic toy factory site visit

The construction of several buildings in our Nyíregyháza-based design project, which started in 2020 and includes several industrial buildings, is nearing completion (and at the time of writing, we already know of a building that is actually in use and in operation!). The final months before the handover can be particularly interesting for an architect’s eye, so the project’s lead architect, Sándor Jassó organised a full-day site tour for all the IN-EX architects who have ever worked on the project, so that they could finally walk through the buildings not only in the virtual model space of the Revit models but also in the real physical space, involving all their senses in learning and experiencing.

The investor is a world-renowned plastic toy manufacturer based in Denmark, which already owns and operates a factory complex on the Nyíregyháza site with a floor area of 160,000 m2, employing several thousand people and producing around 60 million plastic bricks per day, on a built-up area of around 130,000 m2. The buildings we were visiting are being united under a large common umbrella project, the third major wave of expansion in the more than 10-year history of the Nyíregyháza factory complex. This wave of expansion sees the construction of several new buildings with a total built-up area of 86,000 m2 and a floor area of 100,000 m2, as well as the associated utility improvements, internal road networks and parking areas – the ultimate aim of which is, of course, to greatly expand the production and storage capacity. Of course, architects are not primarily interested in utilities and parking, but in the buildings – in terms of functions, the many new buildings under construction include a guardhouse, an office building, the moulding building, several packing buildings, a forklift warehouse, an automatic high-bay warehouse, a heating and cooling energy centre, a sprinkler centre and a high-voltage switchgear station. Another advantage was that not all the buildings were on the same schedule, so we were able to see several different phases of construction on the same day. Of course, the above list shows that this is more than can be comfortably or even thoroughly explored in a day, but the architects have tried to make the most of the day.