Abstract
Architecture - both urban and building scale - always strongly reflects the current social and cultural context. This is of course no different today: the topics that currently define our world - climate change, sustainability, environmental protection, housing poverty... - strongly influence design, sometimes with the stringency of legislation, sometimes as a matter of conscience. Within the framework of the architectural education in Debrecen - student assignments and departmental projects - we often seek answers to the question of what other professional approaches can be found, which could even show an alternative to the current engineering and technological answers that are so intensively present in everyday life. This is one of the ways we think about sustainability, where our primary objective is to show the hidden values and reserves of existing places - buildings, urban spaces - and how currently under-used situations can serve new functional needs with small-scale interventions without significant investment.