Őriné Nagy Cecília (szerk.): A népművészet a 19-20. század fordulójának művészetében és a gödöllői művésztelepen (Gödöllői Múzeumi Füzetek 8. Gödöllői Városi Múzeum, 2006)
Folk Art as Reflected in the Art at the Turn of the 19,h and 20th Centuries and in the Art Colony of Gödöllő. Abstracts in English / Angol nyelvű összefoglalók
208 Abstracts in English 208 János GERLE architect THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND FOLK ART The need for consciously creating a specifically national architecture in Hungary arose starting with the reform age. It was Frigyes Feszi the first, around 1860, who raised the idea that the rural architecture, a till then completely ignored tradition, could serve as the basis for the new style. Ödön Lechner developed in the eighteen nineties his own style, the national form language, which relied on the treasury of forms of folk art. Lechner was thinking not in terms of ornaments but in those of monumental structures and space systems characterised by motifs enlarged to be gigantic and three-dimensional. The general interest in rural architecture has been awakened by the Hungarian village built for the National Fairs and Exhibitions of 1883 and 1896, which confronted the public with the values of the traditional popular culture and with the possibility of their modern application. The influence this model village exerted upon the rural surveys made by the architects of the 19 th century (Lajta, Thoroczkai Wigand, Medgyaszay, Sváb, Kertész, Kós and others) was evident. Their circle has been under the spell of the Arts and Crafts movement, which has placed the research for the roots of the national art into the intellectual frames of a general European trend. Lechner had been seeking the particularly Hungarian forms of the new style within the trend of the general artistic rejuvenation of the turn of the century, the Young coming after him were of the opinion that the modern architecture can be cultivated by maintaining the stylistic traditions of the popular architecture in a way to revise it according to needs but preserving its spirit. Lechner, by his creator's gesture, has elevated his own architecture out from the historical continuity in order to break the thread of the bourgeois architecture of historical traditionalism, according to the spirit of his time. Contrarily to this, the Young have restored a continuity, or to put it more precisely, they wished to ensure the maintenance of a tradition seemingly broken, by following the line of the rural architectural traditions and not by following the line of the bourgeois traditions; denying this way, similarly to Lechner, the 19 th century eclecticism. In the first decade of the 20 t h century, the school relying on the rural traditions created works of abiding importance chiefly in the field of workers' and civil servants' settlements.
