Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
Moderne - the International Congress of Modern Architecture) and then, beside Farkas Molnár, a deputy-delegate of the section between 1932 and 1938. He became a social democrat and an adherent of avant-garde art in Lajos Kassák's Munka (Work) Circle. Kassák taught him that the purpose of architecture is not some artistic evolution of style but "the shaping of spaces in strict accordance with certain economic, material, structural and psychological laws.” Furthermore, the new architecture was not oriented towards the achievement of individual goals but was meant to make a signal contribution to the improvement of living and working conditions of the masses, and thus had a fundamentally sociological mission. Fischer (and Molnár) seized every opportunity to further the cause of low-cost housing for the masses and rational city planning. The two of them held lectures, published articles, organized exhibitions, prepared alternative "counter-designs" — and of course meant their own original projects to serve as demonstrative gestures. Regrettably, it was in the area which they regarded to be the one major field of modern architecture, public housing, that they were unable to boast of any significant achievements for local authorities refused to undertake the task. As a consequence, they were constrained to build detached houses and villas for those members if the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie who found a modern lifestyle an attractive proposition. The owner commissioning the detached house in Szépvölgyi út was static engineer and publicist Dr Dezső Hoffmann. (The literature of the subject used to refer to the house as the Zentai Villa or, erroneously, the Zentai Street Villa. Dr Hoffmann, who became the president of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office in 1945 after filling a junior post at the Office, was born in Zenta, and thus assumed the Hungarian name Zentai, meaning of Zenta.) The reinforced-concrete structure of the house was designed by Fischer’s wife Eszter Pécsi, the first female static engineer in Hungary. Although its designs were made in the summer of 1933, the property was not ready to be occupied before 1934. It was a source of difficulty to turn the house toward the sun and protect it from the winds because of the northwesterly slope that it stood on. That explains the inward-turning character of the tall and narrow mass. The building turns with an almost entirely solid side toward the panoramic view, an expanse whose even surface is only broken by the huge glass wall of the winter-garden stretching all the way to the cylinder of the stairwell. The strip windows of the living room and the master bedroom open in the narrow south-eastern back front, while the nursery-window faces the hill towards the southwest. The apartment is almost puritanical by today’s standards with a >3
