Veszter Gábor: Villas in Budapest. From the compromise of 1867 to the beginning of World War II - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)
overlooking the living room. Light was provided by a gigantic 2x18 corner window, divided by panes and running from the ground floor up to the first floor. In György Masirevich’s villa (Napraforgó utca 15, today No. 13) a two-flight staircase ran into an arched gallery which linked all upper-floor premises in a crescent shape, starting at the balcony. The walls in the corner of the living room gave way to a huge French window, the top ledge of which reached up to the window sills of the first floor, so that the gallery did not receive much lighting through it. The architects mostly designed their plans with the idea that a small building plot requires a compact repartition of the body of the building. However, László Vágó’s villa (Napraforgó utca 1) was based on a rather different conception; it was composed of three blocks articulated into an L-shape, the central element having two floors, while the two sides had a dining and living room, each surmounted by a twenty-square-metre roof terrace. The small semi-circular terrace situated in front of the ground floor hall of the central block was turned into a rather cosy inner court by the protection the two wings offered on both sides. The striking effect of the villa designed by Gyula Wälder (Napraforgó utca 2) is conferred by its not particularly functional star shape. In order to achieve a symmetrical and unified outer effect, Wälder seems to have sometimes completely disregarded practical considerations. (The bathroom and the three bedrooms upstairs were provided with a double-winged window on the inside angle of contiguous walls.) The ground floor living room was equipped with a triangular bay in the centre of the faqade, surmounted by a balcony. This shape was taken up again on the opposite side by a staircase, and on the side faqade by another balcony. The accent placed on the triangles protruding on the central axis of the faqades was enhanced by the ridge following their line - the edge of the roof thus formed an eight-pointed star. Gyula Wälder was professional enough to realise that his usual neo-Baroque style would be too heavy for such a small building, so he tried to find a decorative approach which did not exclusively rely on surface ornamentation. An extreme contrast to Wälder’s villa was offered by the building designed by Pál Ligeti and Farkas Molnár (Napraforgó utca 17, today No. 15). Its strict prismatic 46
