András Ferkai's book is a topography
of buildings in Buda erected between the two world wars, the period during
which it became the Buda we know today.
The topography - called by the author "Inventory"
- makes up about nine-tenths of the whole book. It is preceded by a theoretical
section, comprising the Foreword, and three chapters: The Urban Development
of the Buda Side; Representative Types of Residential Building; and Public
Buildings. The Inventory lists the buildings described by district, and
then in an alphabetical order and ascending street number. Five hundred
and twenty-two buildings are described, and in the majority of cases the
description is complemented by a contemporary photo and a ground plan.
Those who know Budapest, and are familiar with its history, will know that
this is only a fraction of what was built in Buda between the two wars;
nevertheless the book provides a cross-section and overview of an important
period in Buda's urban development.
Until the end of the nineteenth century,
Buda - apart from the Castle District - had the atmosphere of a provincial
town or a village. Its Víziváros and Óbuda districts
were inhabited by artisans, while the gentle slopes of the Buda hills were
covered by vineyards. Only at the end of the last century were the first
apartment buildings constructed for officials of institutions situated
in the Castle District and of the headquarters of the southern railway
line which was to be located in Buda. The first Classicist-style summer
homes were built in the Buda hills in the Reform Period; while in the second
half of the nineteenth century appeared the "Swiss chalet" summer homes
with a wooden beam structure, wooden gables, and jigsaw ornamentation,
representing a notable feature of Buda architecture.
As the author points out, Buda owes its
urban development to the development of transport and the construction
of new bridges and roads. From scattered resorts Svábhegy emerged
as a district of summer houses as a consequence of the construction of
the Chain Bridge, the Tunnel, and later, the cog-wheel railway. The building
up of the southern foothill of Rózsadomb began with the construction
of the Margaret Bridge; while the completion of the Francis Joseph Bridge
provided the stimulus for the development of the Gellért Hill residential
quarter, Fehérvári Street (Fehérvári út)
and its surroundings. It comes as something of a shock to discover that
as late as 1921 the Budapest municipal council debated the question of
animal grazing on Gellért Hill.
It is interesting and probably useful to
know about the decisive impact played by tax concessions in Budapest urban
development, particularly in the development of Buda. In the early 1920s,
tax concessions were awarded as an incentive to reconstruction and to adding
an extra storey to houses to alleviate the housing crisis caused by the
Great War. Later, tax concessions were extended to new housing developments,
with the only stipulation pertaining to completion date and a minimum level
of facilities.
Then, a 1934 decree concerning tax exemptions
put an end to this practice, which threatened to result in uncontrollable
urban growth. The new tax concession scheme gave preference to so-called
regenerative construction, comprising the demolition of old, poor quality
houses and their replacement by modern residential buildings. (There is
reason to believe that in some cases this policy caused the destruction
of some valuable buildings, because in the 1920-30s the concept of what
was an architectural monument was narrower than it is today.) The Vérmezõ
part of Attila Street (Attila út), a considerable part of Krisztina
Avenue (Krisztina körút) and the odd side of Margit Avenue
(Margit körút) were all built up within the framework of this
scheme. Tax concessions were divided into a number of categories. By offering
tax exemptions and concessions, by the end of the 1930s the Budapest municipality
had successfully achieved the replacement of buildings encircling a courtyard
with buildings with wings, as a result of which narrow courtyards enclosed
by access galleries gave way to spacious green gardens of lawns and trees
lined by buildings, thus partially doing away with the invidious distinction
between flats with a better, street view and those with an inferior view
onto the courtyard. (The new construction method was used first in the
Lágymányos district.)
Tax concessions were also used by the Board of Public Works to enforce its urban landscape preferences, stipulating the height of buildings along major thoroughfares and the quality of their facade.
We owe it to Board of Public Works regulations
that the Várhegy (Castle Hill), as seen from the direction of Krisztina
körút, has retained its decisive role in shaping the urban
landscape. These regulations stipulated the height of buildings on Attila
út and at the foot of Castle Hill to prevent them from rising above
an imaginary profile defining the skyline. The wisdom of this decision
is evident when one considers the construction work carried out in Óbuda
in the 1960s, which resulted in uninterrupted strips of highrise flats
stretching like a concrete barrier between the Danube and the surrounding
hills, fatally blighting the natural beauty of the environment.
Ferkai's topography, presented by district, covers all types of residential building: terraced residential housing, luxury residences, the "mass" housing projects, public and industrial buildings - although, in keeping with Buda's natural endowments, the majority of the buildings described are family residences with a garden.
As regards architectural style, the majority
of the buildings selected by the author and completed during the period
between the two world wars belong to modernism, though other styles of
the period are also represented. The conservatism which characterised Hungary's
ruling elite during this period offered many opportunities for traditional
architectural trends, primarily neo-Baroque, and the aesthetic value of
several buildings from this period cannot be denied.
The author's definition of modernism, however, betrays some uncertainty. Ferkai does not mention the circumstances of its emergence in Hungary, the direct source of its architecture being the Dessau stage of the Bauhaus.
The most outstanding Hungarian representatives of this trend had either studied at the Dessau school or came to identify with its teachings. At least some mention should have been made of the fact that 1920-30s modernist architecture had an ideological content and represented a movement: an international organisation CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) was formed with the purpose of disseminating and debating the questions of modernist architecture. The very architects most frequently mentioned by Ferkai, József Fischer, Alfréd Forbát, Zoltán Kósa, József Körner, Pál Ligeti, Máté Major, Farkas Molnár, Gábor Preisich, and Zoltán Révész were members of the Hungarian section. The Hungarian magazine Tér és Forma (Space and Form), a champion of modern architecture, carried numerous articles on new Budapest buildings in the Bauhaus style; furthermore, it devoted every January issue to a comprehensive description of the work of architects belonging to Hungarian section of CIAM. Failure to mention the Bauhaus, CIAM, and Tér és Forma is a serious omission in a book on Hungarian architecture between the two world wars, especially one focusing predominantly on modernist buildings (Tér és Forma does make a fleeting appearance in the form of a bibliographical reference in the topographical part of the book.)
Napraforgó utca, built in the early
1930s on the border of Pasarét and Hûvösvölgy, may
serve as an example of the movement-character of modernist architecture.
Comprising 22 family residences, this street was built by outstanding architects
of the interwar period for the purpose of combining the tenets of modern
architecture with social considerations, and without losing sight of the
financial bottom-line. The intention was to create a prototype estate of
family residences with a garden on the English model for Hungarian middle
class families of modest means. In the theoretical part of the book Napraforgó
utca is given little space, although in the topographical part it is dealt
with at somewhat greater length.
The Foreword contains a confusing statement
which cannot be overlooked: "Due to ideological considerations, in the
Hungarian reference literature "progressive" modern architecture has for
decades enjoyed priority over conservative, traditional and populist tendencies.
I would like to break with this one-sided standpoint: in the present work
it has been my intention to cover the whole range of styles." It is not
clear what the author has in mind here. It is a fact that under the previous
regime modernist architecture was subjected to official opprobrium for
ideological reasons. During the 1950s the powers-that-be waged a relentless
ideological war against modernism in architecture, deemed a form of bourgeois-imperialist
degeneration and made neo-Classicism, declared to be the only true style,
into the official trend, usually referred to as socialist realism (szocreál).
This is what the infamous architectural dispute in the early 1950s was
all about. In connection with the construction of prefabricated high-rise
housing in the mid-1960s, the powers-that-be abandoned the ideological
requirements previously imposed on architecture, reducing architecture
to an industrial operation and rejecting all suggestions that it might
possess any ideological or aesthetic value. On the other hand, if the author
is referring to reference literature from the period between the two world
wars, it was superfluous for him to stress the subsequent break with this
view: the break had taken place long before and modernism had ceased to
take priority over eclecticism.
But the greater part of the book - according to its raison d'étre - is devoted to topographical considerations (who commissioned the building, the architect, the structural engineer, the builder, its structure and construction materials, and style, occasionally supplemented by an evaluating remark such as "deserves preservation as an historical monument"). Overall, we can be grateful to the author for a much-needed publication. Nevertheless, a number of deficiencies cannot be overlooked. Regrettably, the photographs are rather small (although this is probably not the author's fault), and one misses some specification of which view of the building the photograph is supposed to show. Ground plans are included for almost half of the buildings under discussion, but they are not easy to decipher. In the case of multi-storey buildings, it is often impossible to tell which floor the ground plan is referring to, which is especially confusing, because skeleton buildings - representing the overwhelming majority of modernist buildings - allow different ground plans to be used for different floors. The ground plans also fail to indicate both the orientation and function of individual premises and their numbers are not explained.