Fabó Beáta - Gall, Anthony: I came from the East to a City of Great Palaces. Károly Kós, the early years 1907-1914 (Budapest, 2013)
Kós' First Steps as an Independent Architect
The architectural formulation of the design ‘My task consisted of creating a building with a sensible floor plan with the museum function in mind, which is technically durable, easy to maintain and artistically representative of the Székely Nation. In addition, I set the goal to have all the hands-on work done preferably by local, Székely craftsmen and using local raw materials. I discarded all the so-called historic styles and instead made an inventory of all the features I found typical of the Hungarian people of Transylvania, especially the Székely ethnicity in terms of architecture and folk art. I applied these features in a somewhat refined version to a modern floor plan serving the specialised needs of a museum building in order to create a natural, artistically monumental outcome, which every single Székely national can identify with. To avoid needless and costly use of space, I divided the floor plan so that all the corridors and service areas were allocated the barest minimum of space. I avoided sacrificing a single squarefoot of exhibition space to satisfy the superficial aesthetic requirements of symmetry. This effort, however, threatened with the complete disintegration of the structure, resulting in over partitioning and an unbecoming impression rather than monumentality. In order to avoid this, I unified the elements of varying height by the use of simple planar expression of the facades, and in the elevational extrapolation of the plan, I generally combined openings together in groups. I made up for the lost symmetry putting a strong emphasis on the central form (tower - ed.) and the proportionate formulation of the two wings, while I decided to counterbalance the effect of over-articulation of the plan with a stone fence running along the front of the plot.'KOSI929 In an essay on the vernacular architecture of the Székely people (A székely népi építészet), Kós writes about the arrangement of the buildings on the site or plots. In the most traditional locations, the houses were located away from the street without immediate street entrances. In its location behind the traditional carved gates and picket fence the Museum building respects this relationship, choosing instead a more natural disposition with the wider landscape, rather than emphasising the urban surroundings. The steep-pitched almost tent-like rooves of the ancient village houses were connected by Kós to the tents of the original Hungarian settlers to the Carpathian basin of the previous millennia. Alongside the rural vernacular the Saxons had endowed Transylvania with an urban scale from their arrival in medieval times. Winding streets, massive city walls, medieval proportions punctuated by towers were features of an architecture which transposed into usage amongst the Hungarian inhabitants also. This is especially true of the fortified churches and walled cities which played an important role as places of refuge in a region often having to defend itself over the centuries. The interrelated harmony of the architectures of the Transylvanian peoples has been well synthesised by Kós in this Museum building which he created especially for the Székely people of Eastern Transylvania. t The harmony of built form of the Transylvanian Romanian, Saxon and Hungarian cultures H Calvinist Church, Magyarvalkó/Valeni, Kós Károly: Erdély, 1929 Ml Romanian church in Tűre, Kós Károly: Erdély 1929 H Medieval clocktower in Segesvár/Sighi^oara, Kós Károly: Erdély 1929 156
