Tibor P. Sándor

Engineers of Light

Ibolya Cs. Plank - Virág Hajdú - Pál Ritoók: Fény és forma. Modern építészet és fotó 1927-1950. (Light and Form. Modern Architecture and Photography 1927-1950). Budapest, Kulturális Örökségvédelmi Hivatal, 2003, 304 pp.

 

This illustrated volume focuses on the work of some of the outstanding Hungarian architects of interwar Modernism of the last century (a term for the 20th century we seem to be getting used to). The photographs were taken by the best professional photographers of the period. One thing must be set straight from the outset, is this a "best of" selection as regards the architects or the photographers? This is not obvious at the first impulsive, and necessarily superficial, glance, while we are still engrossed in the beautiful images. The parallel studies introducing the two appear to suggest that they are treated on a par; the architectural explanations inserted across the blown-up photographic details and, to a lesser extent, the architectural plans convey the same feeling. After closer inspection and reading, however, I tend to agree with the editors' foreword: the book "is primarily about the contemporary eye, the visual quality of architectural photographs and the architecture of the Modern Movement is only of secondary importance." The selection pays homage to photographers who have since been half-forgotten, rather than offering a review of the development of New Architecture or the International Style in Hungary. Nevertheless, the illustrated volume provides a fine introduction to an understanding of a controversial movement, which was precisely what the photographers aimed to do.
The literature on the architecture of the interwar years is indeed vast: in addition to monographs, a long list of essays, topographies and books on particular architects have been published. Or if you prefer a more mundane approach, the real estate market recognises the special value of the buildings described in the ads as "Bauhaus houses". A publication that illustrates the best of the period satisfies a demand, both here and in the wider world.
It is especially welcome that the book is bilingual, Hungarian and English. With one or two exceptions, the pictures were taken in Budapest. The eclectic streetscenes of Budapest have always concealed from visitors the products of the architectural movement that emerged in defiance of such buildings, nor did guidebooks devote much space to redressing the balance. And so this book offers a chance to discover that other face of Budapest while documenting an era: the pictures were taken shortly after the buildings were completed and one can almost smell the fresh concrete. Once separated by ample space, the villas were subsequently surrounded with newer buildings: the hillsides of Buda gradually became developed. The orchards have disappeared and much of the empty courtyards and brilliant white walls has been covered with lavish vegetation. The passage of time has also left its mark on the buildings. After the ravages of war, improvised alterations, decades of neglect and rampageous restyling by new owners, some of them have changed beyond recognition. Residents of Budapest may find it illuminating to study this part of the city as it was in its former condition.
The title of the volume, Light and Form refers to the essential elements that architects and photographers both use to create space, it also refers to the title of the magazine which originally published these images. Tér és forma (Space and Form), the architectural magazine in point, was the most important platform for the movement, which set itself the goal of renewing Hungarian architecture between 1928 and 1948. This was also the magazine which presented modern Hungarian trends to a professional readership abroad. Virgil Borbíró (1893-1950), the magazine's most important editor, who sometimes wrote entire issues, defended the magazine's commitment to an international style of architecture against allegations of a lack of national feeling, hostility to the nation and even high treason at a time when Hungarian public opinion entertained rather a peculiar view of internationalism; he pointed out with some justifiable pride that his magazine had won recognition for Hungarian architects outside Hungary and that all the foreign architectural journals turned to Tér és forma for illustrations and information.
The early issues of Tér és forma, or to use the preferred lower case of the Avant-garde of the time, tér és forma, were proper artworks that carried messages. As the novelty of the format, the title page, the arrangement of the columns and the use of pictures readily demonstrate, a number of first-class Avant-garde artists helped develop the look of the magazine; these included the versatile Bauhaus architect and designer Farkas Molnár (1897-1945), who first designed it. Visual impression and content were in complete harmony. Initially, the magazine focused on theoretical articles, such as reviews of writings from abroad and the presentation of the work of architects such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others. CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) was founded in 1928; the Hungarian branch was established the same year by Molnár, along with József Fischer, Marcell Breuer, Alfréd Forbát, and Gábor Preisich, who all published articles in the magazine. In the mid-1930s, when the larger building constructions started, which included a growing number of buildings in the new style, emphasis was shifted to the lavishly illustrated presentation of new buildings erected in Hungary.
The theoretical studies aimed at popularising the characteristics of the new architectural style, most notably the rejection of ornamental elements, the functionally designed plans, the efforts to take advantage of the possibilities offered by new materials and structural inventions, the flexibility of plans, the undeveloped spaces increased with the help of roof terraces and columns, the beauties inherent in simple, geometrical masses and asymmetry, the loggias, the delightful effects of glass surfaces, and so forth. However, in that turbulent period, the most dedicated pioneers were not satisfied with formal innovations. They sought answers to the problems of the large populations of European cities; also, they hoped to produce radical changes in the life relations and ideals encoded in the architectural environment. The architect aspired to transform society.
Following the First World War, when refugees flocked to Budapest, a city already suffering from a shortage of residential dwellings and strangled by depression, all ideas aimed at remedying the unbearable living conditions of the lower middle class were particularly timely. Encouraged by the social housing programmes of the Weimar Republic, they pressed for the construction of affordable, standardised and mass-produced small flats, apartment buildings and housing estates, offering healthy homes with good air and plenty of sunshine. They demanded changes in building regulations, which stood in the way of progress. Their views were in radical opposition to the value system of the society of their time. Their ideas about building sites and determining the sizes of plots and flats clashed with the interests of speculative developers, driven by profit maximisation. By calling attention to poverty caused by the government's failure to intervene, they angered the authorities. The architectural plans envisaging a new type of collective lifestyle were not without utopian overtones and they certainly clashed with public hostility to even the suspicion of something collective.
Yet the years that followed the economic depression witnessed a breakthrough in the movement's history. There were favourable changes in building regulations and in taxation. Churches, factories, shopping centres, hospitals, office buildings, an airport, hotels and sport facilities, as well as apartment buildings and homes for workers were built in the new style as government or local government projects. A growing number of luxurious family homes and villas with gardens were designed. (It should be noted that none of the housing estates envisaged originally was completed.) The book's first essay by the art historians Virág Hajdú and Pál Ritoók, highlights the most important events, providing an insight into both the preliminaries and the after-effects of the movement. The authors also cover the 1950s, when efforts were made to imitate the Soviet model, as well as the movement's dying days under the Kádár regime, when prefabricated apartment buildings proliferated like mushrooms, taking the story right up to the neo-modern present. The two authors display an impressive knowledge in guiding the readers through the intricacies of the subject.
In her introductory essay, Ibolya Cs. Plank, who looked at the subject from the viewpoint of the history of photography had to follow a path that was much less well trodden. Hungarian photography in the interwar years is both well known and highly esteemed by the world, largely through the accomplishments of photographers not immediately associated with Hungary, such as Moholy-Nagy, Capa, Brassai or Kertész. Fortunately, by now the oeuvres of the equally talented "resident" artists of contemporary Hungarian photography have also gained recognition abroad. However, the work of Tivadar Kozelka (1895-1980) and Zoltán Seidner (1896- 1960), who were responsible for most of the photographs in both the old issues of Tér és forma and the volume under review, is not well known even to the broader Hungarian public. The quality of the pictures here published speaks for itself. But, in addition to praising the work of these photographers, the author has also taken it upon herself to discuss, through the work of these two, the complex interaction that existed between photography and architecture on the one hand, and between "modern" developments in the history of photography and photography documenting contemporary modern Hungarian architecture on the other, neither of which had been widely discussed previously.
In the 1920s and 1930s, there was, indeed, an overlap between the modern movements in architecture and photography. The photographical movement labelled "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit) turned its back on the earlier schools of photography imitating painting, just as new architecture turned against historicism. Photographers were searching for an autonomous vocabulary of forms that followed intrinsically from the laws of optical imaging, similarly to the way in which modern architects wanted to derive the ground plan from the building's function. Sensitivity to the geometrical abstraction of Constructivism and the beauties of industrial forms were shared characteristics of both art forms. Of the pictures of buildings, the editors evidently selected those that reflected the above mentioned joint features and shared formal elements.
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Tibor P. Sándor
is a Librarian and Department Head of the Budapest Collection in the Metropolitan Szabó Ervin Library.