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

Rented villas of flats

ings, mainly residential ones. He won the architectural competitions for building the headquarters of the Chamber of Engineers (4 Szalay utca, District V) and the winter farming school in Ráckeve. In 1947 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a designer of condominiums for decades around Zurich.

The villa-style building contained eight flats, each of a superb floor plan. The three or four major rooms per flat open from a hall, which, quite unlike the dark, windowless passageways of customary apartment blocks, is a sunny room of great practical use with its loggia on the side front. The rooms for residential use are turned toward south-east in a most favourable manner. The front walls of the upstairs living rooms are entirely made of glass, and the bedrooms have loggias running along their fronts. The facade in the back is more closed: it was here that the service rooms were placed, and it is also here that the horseshoe-shaped stairwell, itself used as a three-dimensional motif, can be found.

The symmetry of the street front is slightly tipped by no more than the entrance and the concrete jardinieres on the loggias. The facade in the back is asymmetric, however, planned in accordance with the classical canon of the golden section carefully balancing positive and negative forms, solid surfaces and voids. The walls of the doorway have a facing of Vitrax glass sheets, and the black steps of artifi30