From the first idea to a building that works: site, programme, plans, sections and the form that comes out of them.
A community centre where young people, including neurodivergent youth, gather, learn skills and find support. Social rooms face outward; quieter support rooms sit close to a calm 1,500 m² circular garden that gives every room daylight and orientation.
A two-storey villa of about 440 m² that stays closed to its two streets and opens onto a raised terrace, the garden and an 11 × 4 m pool. Delivered as a full A3 construction set with nine details.
Curving roof bands that continue into the landscape, and an exhibition hall where visitors circle a central display of architectural models.
Rooms designed down to the furniture, materials and light, and carried to drawings a workshop can build from.
The entrance of a residential building, with a layered cloud ceiling, a wave-shaped timber reception and a full-height living wall at the end of the axis.
A meeting table, a lounge and a desk in one tall room, tied together by timber slats, pale marble and one dark textured wall.
A 2,400 mm double vanity with a fluted oak front and a quartz top, drawn at 1:20 to 1:2 with material and hardware schedules a joiner can build and install from.
Gardens, squares and campuses shaped around shade, water, planting and the way people move and stay.
A leftover strip near Margaret Bridge becomes a walk through three circles: an amphitheatre, a fountain plaza and a water garden, shaded by a pergola that branches like trees.
A raised walkway with water running along it links the campus buildings, between terraced gardens, pergolas and a planted plaza in front of the main entrance.
Form generated from data: sun, heat and shade analysed in code and turned into geometry, coffer by coffer.
One timber surface on a single branching column, reached through three design versions. Each of its 251 coffers reads the summer sun: it opens an oculus where it is cool and deepens its ribs where it is hot.
Federated models, clash detection and documentation run to ISO 19650, with our own scripts on the Revit API.
A seven-level mixed-use building coordinated to ISO 19650. Architecture, structure and MEP models were federated and checked by a clash engine written on the Revit API, then cleared over three rounds.
A design is only as good as the drawings it is built from. These sheets carry our projects down to the joints, layers and fixings a builder needs, from 1:50 wall sections to 1:2 joinery details.
Bring the studio in for a whole project, or for the stage you need: design, BIM, construction drawings or visualisation. Work runs in English and Arabic, from Budapest and remotely.
Concept, massing and space planning for homes, civic buildings and mixed-use projects, developed to a design ready for permit.
Revit models for architecture, structure and MEP, federated and clash-checked with our own scripts, run to ISO 19650 with a BEP and a CDE.
Plans, sections, elevations and details from 1:100 to 1:5, with schedules, automated in Revit so the set stays consistent.
Survey models, redesign and repair details for buildings that already stand: damp-proofing, tanking and existing footings.
Interiors for homes, hotels and restaurants, carried to joinery shop drawings with material and hardware schedules.
Sun, shade and daylight studies in Grasshopper and Ladybug that size façades, fins and canopies, and parametric geometry for complex forms.
Mourad Studio was founded in Budapest in 2024. We work for private clients, developers and architecture practices, taking projects from the first sketch to a coordinated construction set, or joining a team for the BIM, documentation or visualisation stage.
Each project is led by the studio and supported by structural, MEP and visualisation partners chosen for the job.
BIM coordination, construction documentation and climate-driven design.
Choose a time that suits you. The first consultation is a free 30-minute conversation, online or in person in Budapest.
Architecture and BIM studio
Budapest, Hungary
Yaman Mourad, Architect (MSc)
Email: yaman.mourad.20@gmail.com
Phone: +36 20 549 3029
All projects, drawings and visualisations on this site are the work of Mourad Studio or of the partners credited on each project, unless stated otherwise. Please ask before reusing them.
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Mourad Studio, represented by Yaman Mourad, Budapest, Hungary. Contact: yaman.mourad.20@gmail.com.
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Yaman holds an MSc in Architecture from Óbuda University in Budapest and a five-year professional BArch from Damascus. Since 2021 he has worked as a designer on a 16-storey residential tower, as an on-site BIM Modeler, and as an independent architect taking projects from survey to construction drawings.
At Mourad Studio he leads BIM coordination, construction documentation and climate-driven design, and writes the studio's own Python and Dynamo tools so coordination and documentation stay fast and traceable.
A centre for young people, built around a garden of hope.
Young people in Budapest grow up in a city that treats them either as customers or as a problem to be watched.
The project answers with a non-commercial building: a place to meet, to make things, and to recover, open to everyone without paying.
The plot sits in Ferencváros, District IX, a district moving from industrial past to a mixed, community-oriented city. Tram, metro and bus lines bring young people from across Budapest within easy reach.
To the north and east lies the green of Orczy-kert and open sports fields; to the south and west, hospitals, new offices and a shopping centre; all around, dense housing where the district’s young people live. Today the site is a surface car park, an empty space waiting for a use.
If hope had a physical form, it would be the sun. And the simplest form of the sun is a circle.
The site and the city around it are a rectangle: the grid, the rules, the constraints of the community. The design places a circle of open garden inside that rectangle. The circle becomes the heart of the building, a source of light, orientation and energy, and the building turns inward to protect it from the fragmented streets outside.
Every room wraps around the garden, so the garden is visible from everywhere and the activities around it support it.
The first sketch already holds the whole idea: a solid edge to the street, a ring of rooms, and an open green centre where light falls in.
The plan is a gradient. Lively, transparent rooms face outward to the street; quieter rooms sit closer to the calm core. A young person can move step by step from the busiest space to the most private one.
Multipurpose hall (180 m²), café and lounge, exhibition space, reception
Maker workshop, digital media lab, music room, career and mentoring room
Group therapy, three individual therapy rooms, sensory regulation room, quiet reflection room, light court
Offices, staff and meeting rooms, technical and storage spaces
The centre is designed for young people with level 1 and 2 autism support needs, in a community setting rather than a clinic. That shapes the architecture in concrete ways:
The garden is the heart of the building. Trees and planting bring life into the centre; timber and warm light make the edges welcoming; benches invite young people to sit, talk and stay.
A covered walkway runs around the garden, sheltered from winter rain. When the glass doors open, the rooms and the garden become one space for activities.
Terraces look two ways: inward to the garden and its activities, and outward to the city. The focus stays on the heart, so people can always see what is happening.
A regular structural frame surrounds the circular garden, with a light canopy over the roof terrace. The façade is exposed concrete in large panels, cut by tilted fins and coloured with the warm tones of youth: a strong identity from the street, softened by colour that feels welcoming rather than institutional.
The shaped façade fins and shaded terraces cut summer heat gain, the open courtyard drives cross-ventilation through the ring, green roofs and terraces improve the microclimate, and rainwater from the roofs is collected for irrigation.
“Architecture can heal, empower and unite. When design listens to emotions, it becomes more than shelter. It becomes a source of hope.”
Yaman Mourad, from the thesis conclusionA tree in the park becomes a roof.
Budapest summers now reach 28–29 °C on an average July afternoon, and an open park square gives no protection from the sun.
A flat roof would shade everything equally and block the sky and the breeze. The aim was a lighter idea: put material only where the heat is, keep light and air where it is not, and let the low winter sun pass through.
The first study placed the pavilion in an open lawn clearing on Margaret Island, the car-free park island in the Danube, between mature plane trees. The idea was a man-made grove that continues the real one.
In the final design the pavilion stands on a new paved square in the park, with paths, benches and planting around it, so it reads as part of the landscape rather than a building placed on it.
Seen from above, the skin is almost closed on the hot side and opens in a field of small oculi on the cool side. The pattern is not drawn; it comes from the sun.
Budapest sits at 47.5° N. The summer noon sun climbs to 66°, the winter sun only to 19°. Every daytime hour from June to August, 536 hours in total, was plotted and weighted by air temperature.
The result is clear: the hottest hours come from the south-west in the afternoon. That is exactly where the shell comes down to the ground.
The same script was also run for Damascus, at 33.5° N, where the July maximum is 37–38 °C and the noon sun reaches 80°. One script, two climates: the Damascus canopy closes almost twice as much.
The first version was a 22 × 16 m canopy on four trunks, with three clearings and three dips where the roof comes down to form benches. Openings grew larger away from the trunks, so the structure stayed dense where it carries load and light at the edges.
The trunks were funnels: rainwater ran down them, and at night LEDs made them glow. In Budapest 37% of the canopy was open; in Damascus only 18%.
The second version made the idea buildable: a shell of 129 flat plywood plates and 56 folded cells, joined at 504 steel nodes and carried on four timber trunk funnels. A planarisation solver flattened every plate to within 4 mm, so each one could be cut from a flat sheet.
On the hot sides, 58 columns of fish-scale curtains (481 scales) pivot away from the afternoon sun. In Budapest, 38% of the floor received 70% shade or more. The next version had to shade more, with far fewer parts.
The final design keeps the climate logic and simplifies everything else: a single continuous timber surface held up by one branching column.
It lands on the ground on the hot south and west sides, rises to a 7.3 m crown over the centre, and lifts into an open eave towards the north and east, where the park views and the cool breeze are. Visitors walk in under a 3 m arch from the south-east.
Each layer has one job, and all four follow the same sun data: the skin decides where light enters, the ribs how deep the shade is, the tree where the load goes down.
For each of the 251 coffers, the script measures the summer sun on its surface, weighted by air temperature, and applies one rule:
The shading is not decoration added to a form. The climate data decides the openings and the depth of the structure, coffer by coffer.
Across the summer, the canopy blocks 91% of the sun on the ground, weighted by heat.
A ray-traced study checked every design hour: 92% of the covered plaza is shaded for more than 70% of the hot hours, while the oculi keep small spots of light moving across the floor, like sunlight through leaves. Compared with version 2, far more shade from a far simpler structure.
Six hundred clashes, resolved before they reach site.
Every coordination meeting starts with a number: how many clashes are left. But a count is only useful if you can trust it and trace each result back to a real element, a real rule and a real decision.
For this seven-level mixed-use building, the studio built the coordination process end to end, including its own clash-detection engine.
A BIM Execution Plan defines roles, the level of information needed and the clash matrix. A common data environment uses ISO 19650 naming. Architecture, structure and MEP are modelled separately and federated in Revit on shared coordinates.
Nine tests cover structure against walls and floors, ducts, pipes and trays against structure and each other, services against ceilings, a 600 mm plant clearance, car-park headroom and duplicate elements.
The first round found 604 clashes. 83% of the services-versus-structure clashes came from one cause: downstand beams in the ceiling void.
One structural decision, a flat slab, cleared them. Another 140 results were approved conditions or false positives, resolved by refining the rules rather than hiding them.
Every fix is re-tested. Moving the sprinkler tank in round two created a new clearance clash; the first proposed fix would have created another. By the third round the model closed at zero.
An existing family house, redrawn for a second life.
The family already had their villa. The task was not to replace it, but to keep it and make it right for how they live today.
That meant surveying what stands, redesigning it around the garden, and delivering a set of drawings that a contractor in Syria can build from, with every dimension and detail on paper.
The plot is flat, about 50 by 21 metres, with streets along its north and west sides. The house is turned 90° on the plot and set about 9.5 m from the west boundary and 6 m from the south.
That placement leaves the open garden, the lawn and the pool on the sides away from both streets, protected by boundary walls and a line of cypress trees.
Towards the streets the house stays calm and private. Towards the garden it opens completely: the ground floor is glazed from floor to ceiling and steps down from a raised stone terrace onto the lawn, with stepping stones leading to an 11 × 4 m pool.
The first floor projects over the terrace and becomes its shade. A long balcony with a glass balustrade runs along it, and a deep roof overhang shades the upper rooms in turn. Warm timber soffits and pale stone tie the layers together.
Each floor shades the one below it. In a hot climate, that simple move lets the house stay open to the garden without overheating behind its glass.
The ground floor holds the main living room, the kitchen and dining area, a guest room and bedrooms, all opening towards the terrace. The first floor, at +3.50 m, has its own living room and kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms, and the long balcony over the garden. The roof sits at +7.00 m.
Six bedrooms in about 440 m² across the two floors.
A Revit survey model of the existing building became the base for the redesign, then for the complete set: plans with full dimensions, sections and elevations at 1:100, and furnished plans.
Repetitive documentation is automated with Python and Dynamo: dimensions, tags and sheet setup update from the model, so the set stays consistent as the design changes.
Nine construction details at 1:5 to 1:50 carry the design to site, developed from the model’s wall, floor and roof types:
Because the house already stands, the details deal with what is there: an injected damp-proof course, tanking at the wall base and survey notes on the existing footings. The structure is to be confirmed by a structural engineer.
From a render to something a workshop can build.
A render shows what a piece of furniture looks like. A joiner needs to know how it is made: every dimension, material, fixing and tolerance, and the order in which it goes together on site.
The 2,400 mm double vanity sits on a welded, powder-coated steel frame fixed to the wall. A 30 mm black quartz top carries two drop-in basins. The front is made of 25 × 15 mm solid oak slats at 35 mm centres, with push-to-open drawers and soft-close runners.
Elevation, plan and section at 1:20 and 1:10, details of the fluted front and the stone top at 1:2, fabrication and installation notes, and schedules for seven materials and seven hardware items, issued for review and approval.
One room to meet, to work and to receive.
An executive office has to do three jobs: host a formal meeting, support focused work at a desk, and welcome a guest for an informal talk.
Instead of three rooms, the design arranges all three in one tall space, each with its own place and character, tied together by the same materials.
Vertical timber slats wrap the walls and frame built-in shelving lined in olive green. A pale veined marble wall carries timber panels hung on leather straps, a quiet piece of art in the room’s own materials.
Against them stands one dark, rough-textured wall behind the desk. It gives the workplace weight and makes the warm timber and marble around it feel lighter.
Sheer curtains filter the light from the tall windows, so the room stays bright without glare on screens or on the meeting table.
A white coffered ceiling with linear lights spreads even light across the whole room. A slim vertical light strip beside the dark wall and lit shelves add warmth, so the office feels as comfortable in the evening as during the day.
Coming home through a garden under the clouds.
The lobby is the first and last room residents see every day. It should feel calm and generous, closer to a garden than to a corridor.
The design turns the entrance into a short journey: through the door, past soft places to sit, towards a wall of plants, and on to the lifts.
Residents enter through a bronze-framed revolving door that keeps the outside noise and weather out. A runner of warm veined stone leads straight ahead along the axis of the room, towards the reception and the living wall behind it.
The lifts sit to one side of this axis, so the path home is always clear, while guests wait in the lounges on either side.
Above the whole lobby floats a ceiling of stacked, rounded layers, like clouds or the contour lines of a landscape.
Each cloud is built from thin offset layers, so light from the edges washes across the curves and the ceiling changes as you walk beneath it. It gives the room a softness that a flat ceiling never could.
The ceiling, the green wall and the curved furniture all share one idea: soft, natural forms against calm, plain walls.
The reception desk is made of many thin timber fins, each cut to a slightly different profile, so together they form one flowing wave. Behind it rises a full-height green wall of ferns and climbing plants, framed in dark timber.
It is the room’s focal point: the first thing you see from the door, and a piece of garden inside the building.
Rounded armchairs and sofas in textured cream and taupe fabric sit on timber bases, grouped around low brass-framed tables. Gold mirrors in free, organic shapes and a composition of gold discs hang on the walls, catching the light.
Between the walls, textured stone pilasters with slim bronze wall lights give the room its rhythm and a sense of craft.
A garden of shade, water and stage beside the Danube.
Between Frankel Leó út and the busy riverside road, just north of Margaret Bridge, lies a narrow strip of grass that people walk past but never stop in.
It sits close to the Szent Lukács baths, the Danube embankment and dense housing, yet it offers no shade, no water and nowhere to sit. The brief was to turn it into a garden the neighbourhood would actually use.
The garden is organised as a single north–south walk through three circular rooms, each with its own mood:
Between them sit a playground, a snack kiosk and lawns, so families, neighbours and visitors from the baths all find their own place.
The plan was developed layer by layer. Greenery wraps the whole site and fills the spaces between the circles. Water runs along the main axis as a narrow channel, linking the three fountains. The paths follow the circles and cross the site in both directions, and only a few small solid buildings, the kiosks and the café, stand within the open garden.
Over the plaza, the cross walks and the water garden stands a pergola of curved ribs that branch out from slender columns, like the limbs of trees.
In the circles, the ribs radiate around an open centre, so the fountain stays under the sky while the edges are shaded. Along the walks, they form long arcades. Climbing plants grow over the columns and ribs, turning the structure itself into green shade.
Benches line the pools and the lavender beds. Picnic tables gather around the kiosks. Children have their own playground beside the walk, and the amphitheatre gives the neighbourhood a stage for small events. Cobbles, pale paving and water make each place feel different underfoot.
From the streets the garden reads as a low band of arches and trees, never a wall. The section shows how the amphitheatre steps down into the ground, so the stage stays hidden and quiet while the rest of the garden stays level with the city.
A building that flows, and a hall that turns around its centre.
The exhibition centre is shaped by a few long, curving bands that sweep across the site and wrap around each other, like ribbons caught in a movement.
The same lines continue into the landscape, so the building, the paths and the gardens read as one composition rather than a building placed on a plot.
A road and a canal edge the site on one side. From there, curved paths sweep around the building, cutting the ground into leaf-shaped lawns. Long pools with sculptures follow the curves, timber pergolas shade the walks beside them, and two spiral seating areas mark the ends of the composition.
A paved forecourt of pale stone opens towards the road and leads visitors to the entrance.
Seen from above, every line of the plan grows from the building’s curves: nothing in the landscape is straight except the street.
Each band of the roof rises and falls along its length, with a strip of glazing between the bands that brings daylight into the halls. Along the main façade, a decorative screen with a geometric floral pattern filters the light and gives the building a rich surface from the garden.
Inside, a double-height foyer follows the curve of the building. A ramp rises gently along the glass wall to an upper gallery, so visitors see the artworks from changing heights as they walk. Sculptures on plinths line the foyer, with organic timber seating along the glazing.
At the heart of the hall stands a round, stepped plinth carrying architectural models, from small houses to towers, on a circle of warm orange floor.
Around it, slender steel frames carry a ring of white display panels and amber glass plates, so visitors walk in a circle around the models while artworks and photographs face them from every side. Freestanding frames continue the display through the rest of the hall, and white steps along the walls give places to sit and look.
Above, a deep coffered ceiling with track spotlights keeps the light on the work and leaves the room itself calm.
A shaded spine of water and gardens between the faculties.
On a campus, much of student life happens outside: waiting for a lecture, meeting friends, eating, walking from one faculty to the next.
In a hot, dry climate that time needs shade, water and places to sit. The brief was to turn the open ground between the buildings into a landscape that students would want to stay in, not just cross.
The design is organised around a single spine: a raised walkway that runs the length of the site and links the buildings at both ends. A narrow channel of water runs along it, with fountains at its crossings, so walking the spine always means walking beside water.
Below and beside the spine, the ground opens into gardens on both sides, with a large planted plaza at one end in front of the colonnade of the main building.
The raised walkway carries students over the bus drop-off and the service road, so people and vehicles never cross. Planters line its parapets, and the water channel and fountains along it cool the air and mask the noise below.
Where the spine meets the gardens, it widens into small squares with pools at their centre, places to stop and look down over the campus.
On both sides of the spine, the gardens step down in terraces of lawn and planting with long fountains between them. Timber pergolas and white pavilions give shade along the edges, and palm trees mark the corners.
Every bench sits near water, shade or both, so students can choose between the open sun of the terraces and the cool of the pergolas.
In front of the main building, the plaza is drawn as long strips of lawn and paving, each with a line of trees and benches. The strips lead the eye and the feet towards the colonnade and its shaded entrance.
It is the most open space on the campus: room for events, gatherings and the daily crowd between lectures, with shade from the trees along every strip.
