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Hungary Goes Organic
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20233 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
1,690 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
Architecturally speaking, Hungary has already arrived in the twenty-first century, or perhaps the twenty-fifth, or gone back to the seventh. Its new-wave architecture is a startling mix of science fiction, middle-earth mythology, and peasant tradition.
"We want to erect buildings that make us remember our origins and ancestry," says Imre Makovecz, the presiding genius of the country's new school of organic architecture.
Architect Gyorgy Csete explains that the school grew from the dreadful suppression following the Hungarian uprising of 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled in as the world looked on helplessly. "Folk architecture became the base of the architecture of resistance," he says. His inspiration in these dark times came from prohibited populist writers and turn-of-the-century architects such as Odon Lechner, who had led a movement toward a National Romantic style.
In an age when the International style has brought standardization and monotony to the whole world, Hungary has bucked the trend and developed an architectural language of its own. IT is an architecture of waving roofs, undulating walls, virtuoso timber roofs branching like trees and architecture rich in symbolism and full of strange and wonderful building types such as herdsmen's inns and dancing barns.
Organic, says the dictionary, means "capable of metabolism," "showing symptoms of life," or "the characteristics of such organisms." Organic architecture uses mainly natural materials--wood, earthenware, unburnt bricks, reeds, textiles.
By contrast to the strict functionalism of much twentieth-century architecture, Hungary's architecture speaks of evolution, identity, and even spirituality. Prof. Peter Gaborjani, the national commissioner who champions the movement, says: "How often we look through the windows of a house as into the eyes of somebody we are talking to. By this interpretation architecture is a living being. In the traditional Japanese home, they place a rough-hewn wooden column only for the purpose always to remind them of Nature."
The emergence of organic architecture around 1960 coincided with the appearance of the Dance House movement, evoking and continuing natural traditions. "This sort of architecture," says Gaborjani, "is not in the first place a heap of materials or architectural elements. It is not a stylistic architecture but an
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