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

Stam from Holland were built by the Deutsche Werkbund in 1927. The impact of this new type of architecture, very understandably named International Architecture by the British art historian H. R. Hitchcock reached Hungary by the end of the decade.

Hungarian architecture had also gradually changed. The expensive, overloaded, and rather dysfunctional neo- Baroque style was finally abandoned even in public buildings. The young architects who had been given grants to spend a year studying in Rome came back with neo- Classicist ideas, while those who had been sent to Germany returned after the 1926 amnesty from different schools (including the Bauhaus) bringing back principles of new European architecture as well as practical knowledge acquired abroad. Older masters reading specialised literature and going on trips abroad probably also realised that architecture throughout Europe was being defined by new perspectives, and that progress, brought to a halt at the end of the war in Hungary, was continuing elsewhere.

The new villas designed by Bertalan Arkay were presented in close sequence in different specialised publications at the end of the 1920s. These villas, built in Buda, were more modest in size and simpler than those built in earlier years. They were mostly devoid of applied ornaments, the architect preferring to make use of brick as an element of decoration. The inner arrangement of these generally flat-roofed villas was in many respects similar to the small villas of earlier days; one or sometimes two larger rooms downstairs, complemented by a dining room and a drawing room with a staircase leading to the first floor where three small bedrooms and a bathroom were situated. The kitchen, unlike in earlier times, was always on the ground floor, never in the basement. These villas fundamentally differed from earlier residences in that they were equipped with one or more terraces, sometimes even a roof terrace. Bertalan Arkay, the son of the designer of the Judges’ and Public Prosecutors’ district Aladár Arkay, thus renewed his father’s conception, striding across the twenties without further comment and taking the change of circumstances into full consideration. His villas certainly brought new colours into Hungarian villa architecture, but real change was brought about by a small area comprising just twenty-two villas.

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