Keserü Katalin: Toroczkai Wigand Ede (Gödöllő, 2008)

EDE TOROCZKGI WIGRMD (1Ö69-1915) architect, designer Since 1900, when Academic Architecture, Innendekoration and Magyar Iparművészel published some works of Ede Toroezkai Wigand, his name and interiors attained renown in Europe. Owing to The Studio and its Yearbooks, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, he became a foreign representative of British (plank) style, although it was his architecture that was reported from time to time. It was declared the equivalent of Baillie Scott's in Hungary. The reason for this qualification was his special composition of interior spaces. His architecture possesses a seemingly striking twofold character: modern and vernacular. In both cases, his composition of different kinds of spaces (as those of Victor Horta, Antoní Gaudi, and Frank Lloyd Wright) meant an alternative in architecture during the era of Historicism and Eclecticism, as well as in engineering. His initiative was to compose spaces instead of repeating them or copying historical spatial structures, and to construct large halls. Due to the singular basic method of the two stylistic paths of Wigand's architecture, the sources of the vernacular and the modern are one and the same. Wigand's architecture emerged from his practice in interior design. He created different kinds and connections of spaces meeting the requirement of life. He learned from peasant building practice: not only the tectonic elements of architecture, but also the primary standpoints of building, i.e., to turn the house toward the light, to use beam and stone as materials for walls of different levels and of different reasons, deeply descending roofs covering and protecting the inner spaces (the composition), multifunctional spaces as centres for common life, etc. It was a kind of reductionism in architecture, similar to that of the modern one, but was imbued with the meaning and knowledge of life and folklore. Wigand also collected and published folk art in his books. A new architecture parlante was born in this way: a new and functional language of architecture, in a human sense, in connection with the revival of two basic building types - the house and the community building. The vernacular of his oeuvre was a Transylvanian dialect of peasant and historical architecture. He complemented it with a special, dynamic space, organised around a central core, in both his family houses and multifunctional buildings. This element of his work seems to be simply modern, but alongside the composition as building method, if was his personal addition to the tradition. From a present-day viewpoint, cultural practices, by their complex and collec-