![]() ![]() In Hungary, modern buildings in the late 1920s were relegated to private commissions. Paradoxically, the gleaming white modernism of hospitals, schools, shopping centers, and industrial facilities became a symbol for both Czech national identity and a commitment to western values,” writes András Ferkai, a leading architectural critic in Hungary, in a 1998 essay titled “Cultural Identity and The Modern Movement in Central-Eastern Europe.”Īn old photo of Delej Villa, the building Molnár (together with Pál Ligeti) designed in 1929 and where he and his wife lived for a period. “The Czechs came closest to achieving a western-style democracy and for them modern architecture expressed this optimism and catch-up to Western Europe. Unlike Hungary and Austria, Czechoslovakia was on the winning side of World War I and it enjoyed a booming economy and a stable political environment under the philosopher-statesman Tomáš Masaryk. The first modern buildings in Czechoslovakia appeared as early as 1925. Not all countries in Central Europe were opposed to modern architecture. Gedeon Gerlóczy designed this streamlined modern building straddling the corner of Párizsi and Petőfi Sándor Streets in downtown Budapest (1941-1942). Molnár, who had to earn a degree at the Budapest University of Technology before being permitted to practice architecture, drew the contempt of university professors and right-wing student clubs with his Bauhaus-inspired drawings and design plans. This prompted architects to completely break with the aesthetics of Victorian bourgeois individualism and channel the art of modernism into public housing and city planning.īut the modern style was far from acceptable in the Budapest of the 1920s. ![]() The rapid industrialization of the late 19th century created impoverished working classes in cities and made social inequalities more visible. These new stylistic principles were often infused with political ideology. New building materials like steel-reinforced concrete could bridge longer gaps, creating flexible living spaces and better-lit homes. Less became more, in line with the famous credo of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the Bauhaus’s directors. The emphasis shifted to reaching harmony between form and function. The roots of the modern movement go back to the early 20th century when architects started to drop the elaborate decorations of the Revival and the Art Nouveau movements in favor of simpler buildings. At home, Molnár organized like-minded architects into the local chapter of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and actively spread the modern principles through publications and exhibits. The leading advocate of the local movement was Farkas Molnár, a star student and a colleague of the school’s founder, Walter Gropius (Hungary was well-represented at the Bauhaus with a total of 26 students and teachers). The first modern buildings in Budapest appeared in the late 1920s in part thanks to young architects who returned to Hungary after attending the Bauhaus. Despite existing for only 14 years - before the Nazis forced it to shut down in 1933 - the “Bauhaus style” is still a label for pared-down, radically spare white buildings stripped of ornaments. ![]() Modern architecture can be traced back to the Viennese buildings of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, to the Soviet constructivist movement of the 1920s, to the De Stijl group in Amsterdam, but none became as influential as the Bauhaus, the short-lived art school in Germany. Clean lines, sleek geometric shapes, and plain surfaces have become the norm in architecture: hardly a day passes without a fashionable design magazine featuring a mid-century modern or brutalist building, both of which originate in the modernism of the 1920s. Modern buildings and their offsprings dominated global architecture for the better part of the past century. ![]()
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