Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
to the shadow effect. Against the background of stucco-ornamented Neo-Baroque villas of Pasarét, this puritanical tone is likely to have appeared shockingly modern to the contemporaneous eye. The combination of stone and brick and the marked horizontal lines could be attributed to the influence of the American Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses, but the staggered integration of the mass into the landscape is missing here. Instead, the clear separation of the massive blocks from the environment suggest the work of Árkay's Vienna master, Peter Behrens, whose master course he attended at the Vienna Academy of Arts in 1925-26. Behrens always started designing his buildings with the arrangement of its masses, before preparing drafts for the ground plan, as Tamás Csáki rightly points out in a study of Behrens’s work. He also insisted that his students grow into the habit of starting out with rough coal sketches or scale models made of clay or plaster of the mass-arrangement. It was only after they were fully satisfied with the general quality, the appropriate monumentality of the building’s mass, that they were to proceed to allocate functions and to shape the ground plan and the fayades. Árkay himself followed his master's example throughout his life. With the simple spatial forms went decorative details on the Burchard-Bélaváry villa. The striped ornamentation of the gate, the broken-line division of the interior doors, and the matching wooden rails of the stairs in the lobby are reminiscent of the zigzag motifs characterising German Expressionism and the French Art Déco. Together with two more residential buildings designed by Árkay (2/C Alma utca, District XII and 54 Diószegi utca, District XI), the villa was included in an international selection published in Holland, which is why it became a representative of Hungary’s architecture. The building now houses a nursery school. (What a coincidence! The builder’s daughter Erzsébet was the first to introduce the Montessori Method to Hungary in 1927.) Despite the reconstruction jobs carried out on the building and the vertical extension added to it, it can still be recognised and even a few original details survive. The other detached house (54 Somlói út, District XI) was built on the western slopes of Gellért Hill in 1928, and must have stood out of its environment on its completion. The house with a cubic shape and no cornice was built by Mrs Boldizsár Varga and Jenő Halápy for their family. Mr Halápy was a teacher working as the headmaster of the post-elementary training school in 1925, later to become a school inspector. Using the penname Jenő Tabáni, Halápy published short stories and poems, too, in the literary magazine élet (Life). He had possibly been introduced to Manó Lessner (an architect who was rather obscure at the time and who who later 8
