Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 32. (Budapest, 2018)

Piroska NOVÁK: On the porcelain designer career of Éva Ambrus

representatives of commerce and the food service industry preceded the manufacturing of the prototype. Éva Ambrus found instructive the results of this process, which were then incorporated into the final stages of product development and manufacturing as well as the organizing of the product’s release.

The UNISET-212 set is an excellent and vivid example of system design. The pieces of the tableware set are easily combined with one another, capable of serving several functions, and can be safely stacked or lined up, making storage and transportation as well as setting and clearing the table easier. To ensure ergonomic use, the areas of the dishes exposed to more intensive use and thus more breakable—for example the rim or spout—were made of thicker material, thereby reducing the possibility of chipping or breaking that comes with increased usage. The UNISET-212 set, created using the methods of value engineering and the practical application of a complex design approach, was highly successful, dominating the market in the food service industry and in public meal programs. In addition, the set was popularly used in private homes, for serving the family meals. The Alföld Dishware Factory, a division of the former Alföld Porcelain Factory exclusively acquired by the French company Guy De- grenne S.A. in 1999, still produces certain pieces of the UNISET-212 set in response to continued demand. This bears testament to the unending success of the series.27

In the closing of her case study, Éva Ambrus stated that the value engineering method in the areas of product development would still be employed in the Alföld Porcelain Factory.28 This promise, however, was only partially fulfilled because the sets she designed in the early 1980s were

not manufactured; only prototypes were made.29 This circumstance, alongside the forced anonymity that was very typical of this period and which lasted throughout her entire career, spurred Éva Ambrus to end her work at the Alföld Porcelain Factory in 1984 and become a freelance designer in Budapest. She had confronted the lack of recognition for her design work in 1979, when she spent two months in Finland on scholarship. There, the names of her designer colleagues were displayed in every shop window,30 while Éva Ambrus’s name was known at home only within a small professional circle. Exacerbating this situation was that fact that, from the 1980s onwards, the Alföld Porcelain Factory took on an increasing amount of contract work from abroad, which did not require serious designing; thus Éva Ambrus was assigned fewer and fewer professional projects. After leaving the factory, she turned her efforts to making gifts and decorative objects31 as well as drinking fountains, garden and public fountains,32 and—much later—sculptural works.33

Within the history of Flungarian design, the products of Éva Ambrus’s factory design career are important works that set standards. They demonstrate a committed, skilled, rational, complex design approach that was pioneering in so many ways and which set an example for designers of the future. The Bella-207 and UNISET-212 sets are defining, emblematic products of an era.

It was a period in which material culture was defined overwhelmingly by an economy struggling with huge deficits and the entailing hardships suffered by designers, factories and consumers. Because skilled designers were required to make too many adjustments to production demands, the

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