Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
nings of rational modern architecture can be traced back to the 1910s. but the internationally significant modern aspirations were nipped in the bud by the reaction to the Revolutions of 1918-19. Besides driving avant-garde artists into emigration, the dominant conservatism of the 1920s did much to delay the flowering of the new architecture. The breakthrough can be said to have occurred in the late 1920s, and modernist buildings were raised as late as 1943 in Budapest. I have grouped the material of this book into sections according to types of buildings, but the principle of chronological arrangement was allowed to assert itself. Detached houses and villas The first modern villa in Budapest was built to plans by Alfréd Forbát (1897-1971) on Gellért Hill (46/B Kelenhegyi út, District XI) in 1924. The architect who graduated from the University of Munich worked at Walter Gropius's studio in Weimar, and had an important role in working out a set of standard designs for the Bauhaus’ housing estate in 1922. On his visit home, the young architect was commissioned, by Pál Szegő to redesign a residential house whose construction was already half way through. Forbát designed a simple building with a ridged roof and a fagade covered with abraded pebble dash, having the interior painted by the chief of Bau- haus's wall-painting workshop, Hinnerk Scheper. Unfortunately, the villa were damaged beyond recognition in the iwar and then during the ham-handed reconstruction jobs carried out in the 1960s. Its original spatial arrangement was destroyed and its fagades were completely altered. Neither of the two modern detached houses built after the Szegő House represented the Bauhaus mentality. The young Hungarian architects of the 1920s had a wider professional horizon than that. For example, Bertalan Árkay, scion of a dynasty of architects (1901—71), is known as a disciple of the "Rome School”, as he was granted a Cultural Ministry sponsored scholarship to the Collegium Hungaricum in Rome in 1928, and was in fact influenced by the classical modernism of the Italian Novecento. His residential building raised on the hillside above Pasarét in 1927 is not yet marked by that style. The detached house built for general manager of the Pest Roller Mill Co. Dr Andor Burchard-Bélaváry (15 Virág árok, District II) comprises a single-storey cube and another, two-level one. The higher of the blocks is covered by an emphatically projecting roof of a reinforced-concrete slab, while the lower one features a roof terrace. The character of the building is determined by its horizontal lines and two 6
