Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 28. (Budapest, 2012)

Magdolna ZIMÁNYI (GYÖRGYI): The Hungarian Room Designed by Dénes Györgyi at the University of Pittsburgh

The program of nationality rooms At the University of Pittsburgh, there are at present twenty-seven "nationality rooms" as lecture halls. The program was put to paper by the chancellor of the university John Gabbert Bowman upon the recommendation of Ruth Crawford Mitchell, sociology professor at the university. Bowman wished to promote the university in the city based on iron and steel industry to the rank of a leading university so far scattered in barracks in various campuses. He launched a grand plan to have a 42-storey neo-gothic skyscraper, the so-called Cathedral of Learning built as the centre of the university. It is the tallest educational building in the United States to this day; its structure was completed on the very day of the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. Chancellor Bowman wished to erect a symbolic memorial to the cultural heritage of the large numbers of immigrants of diverse nationalities in Pittsburgh with the program of nationality rooms. The data of the 1920 census reveals that among the approximately two million inhabitants of the city and its surroundings, there were about half a million immigrants including 26,000 Hungarians. Chancellor Bowman and Ruth Crawford Mitchell persuaded the national communities that the university was intent on promoting the chances and assimilation of their children, thereby mobilizing their readiness to raise funds for this purpose. The program proposed that in each nationality room an architect of the nationality would present the cultural legacy and set of national symbols of the given nationality. It was stipulated that the culture of the period prior to the foundation of the University of Pittsburgh in 1787 had to be reflected. The rooms were to be free of contemporary politics, thus no living person was permitted among the representations. The leader of the program of the nationality rooms was Ruth Crawford Mitchell from 1926 until her retirement in 1956. She flung herself wholeheartedly into the work as the motor of the program. She visited all nationality organs, unions, congregations of Pittsburgh and its environs, pursued extensive international correspondence, visited the involved countries including Hungary, and also talked and exchanged letters with Dénes Györgyi. The national communities in and around Pittsburgh set up so-called "nationality room committees", sold brick vouchers, staged charity concerts, religious and cultural associations joined forces, raising considerable funds. The weekly Magyarság, Pittsburgh és környéke magyarságának hetilapja [the weekly of the Hungarians in and around Pittsburgh] regularly reported on the progress of the nationality room. The first five nationality rooms - of Scots, Russians, Germans, Swedes and the "Early American" room in commemoration of the first settlers in America, were inaugurated in 1938, followed by the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav rooms in spring 1939. The eighth room, the Hungarian, was completed in September 1939. The last room so far - the twenty-seventh - that of Wales, was inaugurated in 2008. The rooms (with two exceptions) have been in regular use for lectures and seminars to this day. The Hungarian Nationality Room Committee was set up in 1926. Its first president was the protestant pastor Ödön Vasváry,

5 under whom the first 2000 dollars were collected. From 1928 the president was physician Dr. Samuel Gömöry until his death in 1975, the treasurer was George Zimmermann. Although the uni24