Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)

Detached houses and villas

designed the house) by his brother János Halápy. Being a painter, the Halápy brother often exhibited with Lessner at the events of KÚT (the acronym of the Hungarian name meaning Artists’ New Association). Rather than any of the similar constructions raised to plans by the Bauhaus-trained Farkas Molnár, this house in Somlói út was the very hint cubical building in the Buda Hills. It is true that the two types of cube-house differed markedly in their conception. Though regarding himself as a modern architect, Lessner had very different ideas from those held by his colleague, who was Lessner's junior by thirteen years.

On the ground and first floors of the house, which stood on sloping ground, was the family's apartment, while the basement admitted the cellar, the servant’s quarters and, in accordance with long-standing tradition, the kitchen. Meals were conveyed to the dining room and even the upstairs rooms by a dumb waiter. There was a spacious foyer with an open fireplace on the ground floor, which communicated with the upstairs rooms by a set of wooden stairs. In the upper regions of the cube was an attic of sorts with the unconventionally large clearance of 2.5 metres. Writing as the editor of the journal Tér é& Forma (Space and Form), Virgil Bierbauer mistakenly assumed that there was a roof terrace, for the "purposes of sunbathing and physical exercise," hiding behind the solid walls. The photographs published in the

■ The Halápy Home in Somlói út, around 1928

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