Veszter Gábor: Villas in Budapest. From the compromise of 1867 to the beginning of World War II - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)

Villas built during the twenties have fallen into oblivion, even though there were some huge, elegant villas erected in the green areas of Buda immediately after the end of the war. Nevertheless, the 1920s represent a rather negative period in Hungarian building; the conservative spirit and cultural policy reigning in the country strongly influenced the demands of those wealthy enough to have a house built. The Wälderian neo-Ba- roque style, ostentatiously disengaged from the changes occurring throughout Europe, left its mark on the style of both official and private buildings constructed during that period. It is hard to believe that the neo-Baroque villa at Himfy utca 9, which was designed by Gyula Wälder (the prime representative of the Hungarian architectural style in question) was actually built at the same time as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. But Wälder was by no means the only one to work in a late historical style; Béla Málnai, who had been in his own time the author of perfectly up- to-date projects, also indulged in rebuilding the former Sebő Villa (Szarvas Gábor utca 18) as a miniature reproduction of the Petit Trianon palace in Versailles.

Art at the turn of the century was dedicated to the cult of the individual, and the goal architects set themselves when designing the plans of private villas was also in satisfying the personal tastes of the owners. War had pushed the individual into the background and social awareness characterised the decade following it throughout Europe. (Hungary can be seen as an exception of some sort, the shocking experience of the 1919 Council Republic having denigrated communist ideas in the eyes of the majority of the population.) New directions in architecture were defined by the experiments in Holland, Austria and Germany with a view to solving the housing problems of the lower classes. The city dwellings built for the working class in Vienna, such as the well-known Karl Marx Hof, the German Siedlungen (housing estates) like that of the Bauhaus estate in Dessau or Frankfurt- Römerstadt were important creations of modern architecture. Villas were of course not built for the average person, but some experiments actually proposed small family houses as a solution. Worth mentioning is the Weissenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart where small, modest and functional detached houses designed by Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, the Austrian Josef Frank, the Frenchman Le Corbusier, as well as J. J. R Oud and Mart

39