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

Detached houses and villas

ceeded to uproot from their various countries. Most representatives of modern architecture living in Germany were forced into exile, and continued their work in diasporas, settling down in places formerly peripheral from the viewpoint of modern architecture (England, Scandinavia, Turkey, Palestine, the USA, or Japan). From Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the country’s own avant-garde was wholly crushed, only foreign specialists invited earlier from abroad, mainly from Germany, could escape. In Mussolini's Italy, Modernism continued in existence, even though Neo-Classical tendencies were strengthened. Neo-classicism was given a new impetus in countries, such as France, which had earlier been at the head of Modernist experimentation. Austria fell in the mid-i930S, and so did Czechoslovakia after the Munich Pact was signed. Modern architecture was indeed marginalized: by the turn of the 1930s and '40s, it was only in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Greece — and Hungary that the innovative spirit could find shelter.

The villa housing two apartments at 6/B Berényi utca, District I was completed a year before the outbreak of World War II. Its owner, Antal Fellegi had started his career as a stone mason, but at the time he was already Director of the Danube Valley Quarries and Marble Works Co. and held the title chief government councillor. According to the publications, the house was designed by Imre Platschek (1902—43), but many believe the actual designer to have been László Gábor, an architect working in Platschek’s studio in 1936-1939. Platschek had opened his studio

■ The Fellegi villa on Gellért Hill, in 1938 ...

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