Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
use of pilotis, the roof-garden solarium, the horizontal strip-windows on the main fapade are all elements that can be found among Le Corbusier's ideas. The frame and cantilevered floor structure made it possible to open up the western front with windows (whose size and height is in direct proportion to the function of the room behind) along the entire length of the fapade, and at the same time to cut a vertical glass wall into the southern front for the staircase. With an apartment comprising three rooms and a hall on the first floor the freedom of floor-plan arrangement remained little more than a theoretical possibility. Such freedom was actually available to the residents of the second-floor flat, where the four residential rooms could be opened by moving four sliding walls. Half of the walls separating the two bedrooms, the dining room cum hall and the living room from one another could be made to disappear during the day and thus through opening the four rooms into each other one could arrange the spaces available in twelve theoretical (and eight practicable) ways. Moveable walls were applied by several architects in the 1920s (Adolf Loos, Adolf Rading, Le Corbusier, Melnikov, etc.), but the option of opening all the rooms on a floor into a single space was only available in T. G. Rietveld’s Schröder House (Utrecht, 1924). Molnár was perfectly familiar with the art of De Stijl, so he is more than likely to have seen the plan of the Schroder House. It is as if he had had that building in mind when he wrote this on the topic of rational architecture in 1928: "The principle oj) the shorten route demands that the rooms themselves be made moveable, their functions malleable, and the large, spacious living room divisible into sleeping cubicles. ” The idea of flexible space was an issue that preoccupied Molnár throughout his life. In his own duplex flat (4/B Lotz Károly utca, District II), a black sliding room connects two cubicles to the living room in two alternative ways: one is the dining room, the other the study. In the Bajai Villa (32 Trombitás utca, District II), it is by way of turning one half of a disc that the living room and the stair-well connecting the two storeys can be opened into one another. In the semi-detached house built for the Barcsays (4/A-B Vércse utca, District XII), he placed vertically moveable drop walls between the living room and the cubicles. Incidentally, a photograph showing the house with its designer was taken of this building, too: in Zoltán Seidner's photo, the architect is relaxing in a deck chair on the roof terrace with his little daughter astride his knee. It is observable about the houses of Molnár and Fischer among others that the severely rectangular forms of the villas built in the early 1930s were soon replaced >7
