Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)

Detached houses and villas

are clearly separated: the broader part on the left contains the hall, the dining room and the living room in a T-shaped system of interconnected spaces, while the narrower wing to the right houses the three bedrooms opening from the same straight hallway. Belonging to the former section is a covered terrace toward the front, while the latter has another, also covered, terrace giving on the backyard. The living room is opened up by a corner window (fitted in part with sliding wings), while the hall has a four-panel, accordion-like French window. Arranged along the facade in the back are sash-windows, while the last bedroom in the row has a corner window for flowers. Attuned to the local climate, this soberly beautiful bit of architecture has proved to be fairly durable, as practically no alteration has been done to it. It is to be regretted that the mentality it reflects was not to become a widely emulated model.

Colour photographs of the building appeared in a 2001 special issue of a journal devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright and his "Flungarian followers." In it, László Szekér puts forward the proposition that "the arrangement of the ground plan is reminiscent of the models of the Usonian houses, and of those it is the ones with a straightforward arrangement of spaces that it most closely resembles." Fie goes on to add that any direct influence coming from the American master's work is out of the question, as designs for this building were made a few years prior to those of Wright’s first houses of an oblong shape (1939). While there is indeed no evidence of any direct influence, the Zseltvay House displays much of what is known as Wright's principles of architectural design. Such are the inclusion of all living areas in one large space, the platform-like pedestal of the building with extended level planes associating it with its site, the embracing of the windows into one "light- screen" and the reduction of building materials in favour of mono-material so far as possible. These principles were formulated by Wright in 1931 on the basis of the numerous prairie houses he had built around Chicago at the turn of the century. László Szabó may have come across that piece of Wright's, but he is more than likely to have known the prairie houses, as an album of Wright's early work was brought out by the German publisher Wasmuth as early as 1910 and 1911. Something very different is now meant by the term organic architecture in Hungary today, but one should not hesitate to conclude that this, too, qualifies as such.

By the end of the thirties, modern architecture had lost most of its appeal in Europe. Though they used different pretexts, all totalitarian regimes were unanimous in severely censuring the international Modern Movement, which they pro23