Keserü Katalin: Toroczkai Wigand Ede (Gödöllő, 2008)

five character, are more important sources and subjects of art/architecture than their IS autonomous-classical language. The revaluation of Wigand's works is based on his varying types of communal buildings, such as farmer's circles, schools and combined schoolchurches adapted to the local circumstances in the villages of the Szekler land in Transylvania. They were built in the framework of a modernisation programme of the Hungarian government, before the First World War. In his planning, he did not make a distinction between social and common, between culture and art/architecture. He became the teacher of environmental design for the Highschool of Applied Arts in 1919, and he taught in the spirit of the unity of building, garden and interior design. With a comprehensive publishing activity, he continued to disseminate this view in professional as well as popular papers until the end of his life. His standard designs for the reconstruction of regions damaged by the war go back to his practice in architecture with local traditions in mind. The life and culture of Hungary between the two World Wars was crucially influenced by the Trianon Treaty, i.e., by the loss of two-thirds of the country. Toroczkai Wigand took part in the planning of refugees' housing estates with a traditionalist, as well as modern approach, but he could not succeed against individual plans victorious in tenders invited for public buildings, again historicist. Nevertheless, he produced a number of model designs for inexpensive, as well as modern detached houses, blocks of freehold flats and villas, exploiting ground spaces reduced to the minimum in the greatest possible way with smart ground-plan solutions. During the last decade of his life, he was absorbed in shaping his museum-like flat containing an art relic collection from the Szekler land and his own life-work. At the siege of Buda in 1945, this house was destroyed, and he himself was not able to outlive the end of the war. His chief architectural genre, the house, has become a designer's task in modern times, and the open ground-plan Toroczkai developed has become a specific feature of modern architecture. His view as a designer was complex, with the starting point of the inside world drafted by the interior and its furniture, as well as with a spatial system expressing and evolving its relations to the inside world. The house built from the interior according to individual, as well as specific demands and possibilities, was completed with the environmental project. This organic view presents Toroczkai as one of the founders of modernism revalued in our times. His organicism implied a functional view at the same time, in the humane sense of the word, and it involved the vernacularism of the turn of the century, a general tendency to find an artistic mother tongue in the local (peasant) culture. (Translated by Katalin Keserű and János Gerle)