Veszter Gábor: Villas in Budapest. From the compromise of 1867 to the beginning of World War II - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)
1941-42) also corresponded to the new tendency, but its composition was still strongly influenced by the architecture of earlier years. On the plot stretching behind the Bayer Villa mentioned earlier, a two-storey villa (Pipacs utca 3, Jenő Padányi Gulyás and the brothers Olgyay, 1937-38) was built supposedly for Ebba Bayer-Krucsay, Dezső Bayer’s daughter, and her husband Dr. József Imre. The simplicity of the new upper building strongly contrasted with the by-then outmoded pompousness of the lower villa. The outer walls of the large villa (3300 cubic metres of volume) were rendered simply, and merely ornamented with odd patches of rubble work and a ridge-tile roofing. The beginning of World War II interrupted the building of villas in Budapest for several decades. It is true that some carefully designed detached family houses were actually built in Buda during the sixties, but the builders were very careful to avoid, in their own interest, giving the impression, as slight as it may be, that the house in question could be a villa. As for the villas built from the middle of the eighties on, they are part of another page of architectural history. What’s left today of the houses described above? Unfortunately not much. Of all the buildings exposed to transformation, villas are the type of dwelling most likely to suffer damage. The gardens and open space usually surrounding them constitute an eternal temptation for architects and owners alike to build annexes of all kinds which might be very advantageous from a practical point of view, but almost never fail to upset the aesthetic balance of the original building. The fall in living standards resulted more or less automatically in the internal division of the largest villas, in other words the disruption of inner spatial proportions, involving the disappearance of the carefully balanced original structuring of space and its replacement by make-do arrangements. The continually rising prices of ground plots brought about the division of larger parcels, and resulted in unfavourable changes in the original environment of the villas. And there was also the war. Many villas were damaged and were rarely restored to their original form. Nationalisation often implied a change in function, which again involved transformation, both outside and within. By the time the protection of historic buildings commenced, there was barely anything left to protect. 62
