Paul Stirton

Vernacular Modernism

Anthony Gall: Kós Károly műhelye: Tanulmány és Adattár. The Workshop of Károly Kós: A Study and Documentation. Budapest, Mundus Kiadó, 2002, 527 pp. (Parallel text in Hungarian and English.)

 

In 1911 the young Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later to take the name Le Corbusier) plotted the itinerary of his 'oriental journey' through Europe sorting each of the places he had visited into three categories: industry, culture and folklore. Budapest, in architectural terms, came under folklore. This might seem odd, given the fact that for several decades the Hungarian capital had been one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. Paradoxically, when the English Arts and Crafts designer Walter Crane visited the Hungarian capital in 1900, he had been struck by the opposite impression. With his interest in traditional craft survivals, Crane actually found Budapest to be "the most up-to-date city I have ever seen". There is a sense in which both were accurate in their impressions because the years between these two visits saw the emergence of a full-blown National Romantic style of architecture which had spawned a series of wooden buildings inspired by the village architecture of Transylvania in the heart of the 'stony mass' of Budapest. This urge towards a national style had been developing for some time and could almost be taken as the defining characteristic of Hungarian high culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The dominant preoccupations, however, were often with sources in South Central Asia and Persia which were thought to be the original seat of the Magyar peoples. The new generation of designers, who came of age in the first decade of the twentieth century, had less interest in this remote and exotic world. Instead, they sought a more authentic model for their national ideals in Hungarian vernacular architecture and, in particular, in the rural buildings of the Kalotaszeg region. The finest example of this tendency is Károly Kós, the subject of a major new monograph by Anthony Gall.
If the new spirit of National Romanticism (or Romantic Nationalism, as it is sometimes known in America) placed a premium on youth, then Kós was one of its greatest prodigies. Eliel Saarinen was just 27 years old when he received the commission for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Gaudi was 31 when he took over control of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh 28 when he was awarded the commission for the Glasgow School of Art. Kós was just 2 years out of college in 1908, aged 25, when he received the commission for the pavilions at the Budapest Zoo. Within a year he was also designing the primary school in Városmajor utca in Buda, and in the following two years had gained the contracts for the Székely National Museum at Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfintu Gheorge), the Calvinist church at Monostori út in Kolozsvár (Cluj), and the main square at Wekerle, the new garden suburb on the south-eastern edge of Pest. These were all high-profile commissions, awarded by august public bodies (Budapest Municipal Council, the National Directorate of Museums, the Royal Ministry of Finance, etc.), yet they were all given to a designer who was still in his 20s and had hardly completed a single building.
These were heady times for an ambitious young architect, especially one with a mission to reinvent Hungarian architecture in a style that was both 'modern' and 'national'. Kós was certainly up to the task and he set to work producing designs, models, drawings and prints to meet the demands of his clients. He was clearly driven, in the sense that he had ambitions far beyond simple professional success. Even as a student he had begun writing literary and theoretical works that reveal a single-minded dedication towards his chosen vocation. One senses a certain earnestness, not to say dogmatism, in such a young man, but there is no doubting his sense of purpose when he writes, "Our people chose the middle ages as their stylistic base, and have never abandoned it, even to this day"; going on to add, "Medieval art forms the basis of Hungarian folk-art and folk-art forms the basis of our national art".
Such sentiments were hardly new. Similar views had been expressed by Ödön Lechner and his followers for many years. Kós, however, found little to interest him in the monumental architecture of Lechner. The great man had performed a major function in focussing attention on the issues of a 'national language of form' but his grand and exotic public buildings showed only limited awareness of the indigenous folk sources that Kós felt were central to the new agenda. Like his contemporaries across the full spectrum of the arts and sciences, Kós wanted to preserve the essential truths and living spirit that he sensed in the vernacular buildings of Transylvania and, above all, in the Kalotaszeg region. In 1907 he had embarked on a major study tour of the area around Kolozsvár, and it was this, more than any folios of historic architecture, that informed his work. It is partly these folk sources which make the designs for the Zoo pavilions so attractive and engaging. Not only are they built using traditional rustic materials (roughly hewn wood and heavy stone rubble), there is a human scale and variety to the buildings which makes this whole complex in the middle of a huge, modern city something of a curiosity. Several commentators have remarked that the zoo is reminiscent of a Skansen (folk building museum) or exhibition site, made all the more unexpected because it has been designed for exotic animals. If it seems unusual to modern visitors, one can only imagine what it must have been like for the formally dressed, urban bourgeoisie of Budapest who flocked there after its opening.

The Zoo pavilions could perhaps be explained as the architecture of leisure and display, but the four commissions which followed it seem to span the range of serious, public building types: a school, a museum, a church and a community square at the centre of a modern housing development. To Anthony Gall, these buildings confirm the success of the new style, proving that Transylvanian vernacular could be developed into an urban language of building suitable for modern society although, to some critics at least, this remains debatable. What it certainly indicates is that the new style was taken up with great enthusiasm, sweeping almost everything before it. Kós could hardly keep up with the amount of work he was given. There is an anecdote that while working on the Zoo, Kós and his collaborator, Dezső Zrumeczky, slept in shifts so that they could produce the drawings needed to keep up with the building work, one relieving the other at the drawing board as each was forced to break from exhaustion. Kós also recounts a story in his memoirs that he was not particularly interested in the Wekerle commission, had no experience in that sort of thing and only pulled together a modest proposal at the last minute. Even allowing for the tendency to underplay one's efforts to further emphasise the brilliance of the design, the fact that he gained the commission at all, never mind that it was awarded unanimously, gives some indication of the massive popular appeal of contemporary architecture inspired by the medieval townscapes of Transylvania.

Kós's period at the height of popularity was short lived. The First World War brought an end to major building projects and the aftermath was so disastrous for Hungary that the whole culture was fundamentally altered. The vernacular style that had inspired architects and clients alike in the decade before 1914 seemed less vital and relevant to the new realities of the 1920s. Circumstances were even more difficult for Kós since he had built his own house, Crow Castle, at Sztána in his native Transylvania, and after the war he chose to stay there rather than move to the truncated Hungary of Admiral Horthy. It was a moral choice more than anything else. Kós had strong views on the importance of the region and may even have been entertaining ideas of an independent Transylvania before the catastrophe of Trianon. He was also mindful of the need to maintain the culture of the Hungarian minority in the greater Romania and applied himself to this with characteristic zeal. At various times in his post-war career, Kós was a printer, publisher, designer, author, lecturer, politician, farmer and tireless campaigner for the preservation of the historic culture of the region. One can fully understand why in 1932 he was described as the "general Transylvanian factotum".
Even in a climate where his architectural style was unlikely to attract many commissions, his multifarious activities must have hindered the development of his career as an architect. As a result, Kós's later work has always been less well known and difficult to assess. The situation was made even worse by the destruction of his archives when Crow Castle was ransacked in 1944, making it all but impossible to gain a clear view of his work in the inter-war period. The detailed catalogue of buildings and projects which forms the second part of this book is therefore a very useful and informative resource. Gall has brought together a wide range of documents including drawings, prints, primary writings, early photographs, postcards and a large number of good modern photographs taken especially for the book. He has also taken a strict line on the buildings to be included in the corpus; a wise policy since several known buildings have been lost while many others have, in the past, been attributed to Kós without any supporting evidence. This last point is significant because the Transylvanian vernacular became a popular and recognisable style very quickly and it was easily imitated at a basic level for small houses and partial alterations to existing buildings. I myself remember being shown two houses in Sfintu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyörgy) in the early 1980s which were, by popular account, designed by Kós. Gall has rightly excluded both of those and no doubt many more, although that doesn't rule out the possibility of information coming to light which would put them back into the canon. There is more work to be done but Gall has provided a core of reliably documented buildings covering everything from schools and hospitals to agricultural outbuildings which will form the basis for all scholarship on Kós from now on.
The pattern of Kós's life poses other problems to the historian. The natural division between pre- and post-Trianon makes for an uneven career trajectory and an extremely lop-sided biography when one remembers that he lived to a great age. (He died in 1977, aged 93.) Kós is unquestionably one of the major figures in twentieth century Hungarian architecture but, despite the claims of his supporters, all his major designs were completed by the time he was thirty. Apart from the private houses, church restorations and fairly modest agricultural developments that were the mainstay of his later architectural practice, the only significant buildings after 1914 are two schools and an art centre in the late 1920s, which are themselves fairly traditional in form and structure. This is hardly the fault of the architect. The absence of opportunities to design major buildings would limit any architect's reputation in the larger scheme of history. To give more balance to the career overall, however, Gall has made a case for Kós's later work as "a significant contribution to modern architecture in Transylvania". To this reader, at least, that argument remains unconvincing. The central problem seems to have been the inhibiting effects of Kós's overriding priority in the 1920s and 30s - to preserve the beleaguered Hungarian culture of Transylvania - which limited his ability to develop as an architect. Not only were the immediate and wider issues of his community of paramount importance, which must have distracted him from ongoing international debates on architecture, it appears to have encouraged him to cling on to the forms which had proved so vital and successful in the years before 1914.
Discussion of Kós's generation always invites parallels with the contemporary work of Finnish architects like Eliel Saari-nen. There is every justification for this since, not only were the two men working in a similar vein, they knew one another and corresponded on matters of design and national culture. Saarinen's career, of course, unfolded in a manner quite different to that of Kós, just as the history of Finland played out in a very different manner to that of Transylvania. Freed from the political pressures to hold on to his earlier forms, Saarinen's work developed into something more expansive as his career moved on to the international stage after the First World War. It is revealing that when Kós saw a recent work by Saarinen at the International Architectural Exhibition of 1931 he felt that he didn't recognise it. There was nothing "Finnish" about it, "either in materials, or line, or tone, or contrast; on the other hand it was not lacking in sobriety, coldness, even German Sachlichkeit". In short, Saarinen seemed to have betrayed the sense of nationhood in design which Kós regarded as a burden of personal responsibility. It is this close identification with the political currents of the period which makes Kós's life and work so interesting, even when the architecture itself seems uneven. In that sense, one might hope that The Workshop of Károly Kós will have a wider readership than architecture specialists alone.
Important as it is, this book leaves several questions unresolved. Kós's work is closely related to that of Ede Thoroczkói Wigand, to the extent that the older architect seems to have regarded Kós and his circle, the Fiatalok (the Young Ones), as unacknowledged followers. Wigand's role in Kós's development is glossed over here, as it is in most other accounts, save for some passing comments on their brief collaboration in 1910. The similarity in their drawing styles alone is worth closer analysis and may give more credit to Wigand as an innovator in this field. One might also have expected a stronger case to be made for Kós as a forerunner of green architecture and environmentalism, which helped in the rehabilitation of several earlier architects during the 1980s and 90s. The theme is touched on, but may be worth further development.
A bigger problem is the irritating production weaknesses which mar the book overall. It is over-designed for a scholarly work and the layout of the information is often confusing, with the result that it is sometimes difficult to use for detailed analysis. An example of this can be seen in attempting to trace the location and medium of Kós's original designs. As an outstanding graphic artist, Kós often rendered his perspective drawings in a manner reminiscent of woodcut prints; he also made woodcut prints of his buildings, and these were all, in turn, reproduced by photo-lithography in contemporary journals, from where many have been reproduced here. Some clarification of the status of these images would have helped. The text could also have been more closely proof-read, both for grammar and typographic errors, at least in the English sections. Having said this, I would not wish to undermine the genuine qualities of this monograph. Few Hungarian architects or designers of the twentieth century have been so well covered as Kós is in this large and generous book. The translated primary sources alone would make it essential reading for anyone interested in turn-of-the-century architecture. As an introduction to this major figure and his work, it has no equivalent and offers a mass of fascinating and essential information.

 

Paul Stirton
is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at Glasgow University in Scotland, and Visiting Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts in New York.