Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
by some gentler, curving shapes and more complex compositions. Instead of boxy pillars, round columns came to be used: next to the prism the cylinder also appears. Fischer's later buildings often have curving masses (io Rege utca, District XII), the corners are rounded off (14 Baba utca, District II) or consist exclusively of convex and concave forms (15 Rege utca, District XII). Molnár also used rounded-off edges (4/A-B Vércse utca, District XII), trapezoid shapes (8 Mese utca, District XII), and even elliptical masses (Kallivoda House, Pécs, The Church of the Holy Land, 3-5 Heinrich István utca, District II). The relaxation of forms fits into the general tendency of the avant-garde losing its hardness and moving toward pleasantness and comfort. That, too, has its precursors in Erich Mendelsohn's dynamically arching, smart department stores and cinemas built one after the other from the mid-ig20S; the buildings of Hans Scharoun featured curving masses and rounded-off shapes, and features borrowed from the world of ocean liners, came into fashion in seaside towns and cities. One only has to recall the resort hotels in the South of England familiar from the various Poirot movies or the modern buildings of holiday spots along the coasts of the Black Sea, the Adriatic or in the Polish town of Gdynia. The period in question was also the time when car bodies and airplane fuselages were first designed in accordance with the laws of aerodynamics. A particular Czech architect-engineer (Vladimir Grégr) built streamline villas for the stars of the Prague-Barrandov studios at the same time as designing sports cars for the Skoda automobile factory. When as a child I was taken for a walk on the slopes of Sváb Hill Minor I was always impressed by a strange-looking building. It looked like a stranded ship - not as a rowboat or a sailing ship but as an ocean liner complete with a vaulting deck, portholes, a bridge, and an elegant salon. Later when 1 had graduated as an architect, I did some research to find out about the house at 21/A Határőr utca, District XII. Luckily, the blueprints were available in the architectural archives of the municipality of Budapest, so I learnt that the building had been designed by Zoltán Révész in 1937 for "the Honourable Mr Géza Holitscher of Csetény," who had earned his degree in mechanical engineering at the Zurich Federal Polytechnic Institute (ETH) and was a co-owner, like his father, of the Engel Károly Electric Works (EKA). I have no idea how such a wealthy bourgeois globe-trotter had ever come in contact with a tossed-about young architect. Zoltán Révész (1907-44) graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1929, but found little employment in the years of the Great Depression. He painted perspectival views, made scale models, and then designed furniture and house fittings. He was affili18
