Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
Lessner was perfectly familiar with the principles and architectural practice of Adolf Loos, Josef Frank and Oskar Stmad. His cube-house in Somlói út is reminiscent of residential buildings designed by Loos or by Frank. These works do not necessarily exhibit any strict adherence to the strict Modernist ideology of tabula rasa. Similarly to Loos and Frank, Lessner was of the opinion that modern architecture should not be based on advanced technology alone but was to freely avail itself of whatever had proved useful in the past. "The machine id impersonal and cares not where it is used or by whom it is operated," he wrote in 1930. "The machine is a 'type', while a house is that only conditionally. The same problem is solved in one way it the building is in a plain tieid, in another it it stands on the hillside, it it is overshadowed or is exposed to the sun. We all have our prejudices when it comes to masses and proportions. [...] We should not by all means be guided by the idea that the major criterion ot modem architecture is a horizontal widow in a steel trame or a tlat root with glassy concrete bricks. Neither must it be the tramework structure nor the use ot a montage. These are very tine in their place. However, it I am supposed to build a winepress house on the Badacsony hillside, I will not hesitate to make it ot stone and cover it with a hatch root, because that is what looks good there and that is what ties along the road. And yet my winepress house may be pertectly new and tine." On the house in Somlói út it is mainly the mosaic-style composition that suggests this kind of attitude. Here it is the shuttered windows, the chimney protruding, in an English- style, from the facade, the moulded columns of the terrace that make the abstract cube into a house. And yes, the Baroque arc of the wrought-iron strap anchoring the railing to the wall, the external drainpipes, or the glass roof above the entrance can all transform themselves into ornamental features. Since the onset of postmodernism, these allusions are looked upon with more understanding. The original effect of the Halápy House is now considerably marred by the fact that the loft above the first floor has been turned into a flat. The windows cut through it have broken the tense proportions of the facade, and the new coat of paint applied to the walls (even the black-and-white photos published in the 1/1931 issue of the journal Moderne Bautormen reveal that the wall used to be of a darker, while the shutters of a lighter tone) have had their share in forcing the once so remarkable building to blend into its drab environment. Another building that was given international press coverage was a particularly photogenetic construction designed by József Fischer, that enfant terrible of HunII
