The early Thirties brought a sharp change of direction for Kozma as they did for Hungarian architecture as a whole. Being someone who kept himself abreast of wider European developments, he was well aware of what was emerging to the west of Hungary, particularly in Germany. The conservatism favoured by the political establishment, dominant in Hungary's post-war architecture, began to give way, and the influences of German functionalism and
Italian Novecento made themselves felt in the simple forms of buildings that were being erected around 1930. It was then that Kozma found himself again, so to speak, and put the earlier indecisiveness behind him. His designs for several houses (5 and 6-8) that were built in 1931 as part of a residential development on Napraforgó Street, in the Pasarét district in Buda, blend in the modest gestures towards modernist architecture that were being made by other architects on the same estate.
gradually to abandon the decorative elements in his buildings, shifting the centre of interest away from the attractiveness of detail towards a carefully weighed offsetting of masses. Kozma achieved their harmony by using perforations by large apertures to offset their compactness, although he was unable (and did not seek) to hide his approach as an interior designer. The villas can be regarded as his chief body of work and their core was a living space that could be divided into several parts by sliding walls, with ceiling-high doors that opened full-length. Most typically, the living space would comprise three areas with a large sitting-room that, if at all possible, would have a window all along one wall; outside that there would be a covered terrace, while abutting on the living room would be a smaller, usually cosier, dining area. That tripartite space could be opened into one by pulling the partition screens aside, so that the transition between interior and exterior was achieved almost imperceptibly. (The same kind of "flexible space" was also fundamental in the work of Mies van der Rohe.) Farkas Molnár (1897-1945) tried a similar concept in his designs of villas on Lotz Károly Road and Harangvirág Road, both in Buda's Pasarét district, but his attempts were clumsier than what Kozma had achieved through spatial relationships that were almost self-explanatory.
Increasingly, Kozma became one of the most highly sought-after architects of the Hungarian haute bourgeoisie: it was a status symbol to live in a house designed by him. That may be one reason why the architectural avantgarde, and especially members of the Hungarian section of the Congres International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), kept him at arm's length. Their emphasis was on the social tasks of architecture, seeking to build homes for people living on subsistence incomes. (However, the realities of life in Hungary put that out of the question, so CIAM members too were obliged to work for a middle-class clientele, albeit the less well-off, for whom they designed smaller buildings on smaller plots of land and to less demanding standards than Kozma.) Kozma's own approach in any case would have distanced him from that group: he was never as strict and doctrinaire as the CIAM modernists, who were only able to accept constructions that displayed total honesty. They held it against Kozma that in several buildings he had committed the cardinal sin of cladding wall surfaces between lengthwise rectangular windows with black-tinted glass purely in order to give the impression of a continuous window band; or that he covered up the columns in the lobby of the Átrium cinema with mirrors in order to provide visual relief in spatial terms. Kozma was, indeed, often accused of going for the aesthetic effect, and it is certainly true that he would tackle architectural problems from an aesthetic angle, seeing buildings first and foremost as issues of mass and space, and only secondarily as socially significant issues.
Looking back from a perspective of some seventy years, we can see just how forwardthinking Kozma was-maybe simply because he did not set out from a doctrinaire position. That does not mean to say he lacked principles or was not equipped with an appropriate theoretical grounding. He, like any selfrespecting modern architect, proceeded from an analysis of the functional requirements, adjusting the relationship of the spaces that fulfilled the client's demands to the requirements of their users. In the vast majority of cases, his clients commissioned him to furnish as well as build a villa, so he was in a position to design the space together with its furniture. He was therefore able to break up a large living room with, say, a reading corner or music-making area, and thereby give it a homely feel. His houses were emphatically never little boxes. Trained as he was at the start of the century, Kozma was able to sense precisely, and utilise, the role that a protrusion or a recess would have in articulating mass and space. It is customary to view the
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projection on the right-hand side of the living room in his Klinger Villa (10 Hermann Ottó Road in the Pasarét district) as being there purely for its own sake, but Kozma in fact used it to create a dimly lit, intimate alcove for conversation within the large living room, which was brightly illuminated by the huge window. (The terrace that was planned to go on top of this alcove, in front of the bedroom, was merely an extra; it was something that could have been achieved without any substructure, just by using a cantilever.) It should be recognised, nevertheless, that Kozma had an easier time of it than his younger contemporaries, simply because he was sought after by a wealthier clientele who could afford to give him a freer hand: he was under no great pressure to be sparing where scale or cost were concerned. He was therefore able to plan more expansive spaces and to insist on contractors who could ensure a higher quality of work: in short, he could deliver his houses to a higher standard.
In addition to his villas, Kozma also designed two major apartment blocks, one on Régiposta Street, in Pest's inner-city area, the other on Margit Boulevard in Buda. (At the ground-floor level of the apartment block on Margit Boulevard, in the courtyard space, he created the Átrium cinema, arguably the finest of that era, with its scallop-shell auditorium.) In these cases, of course, like anyone else, he had no scope to create complex spatial relationships; however, he did have an opportunity to demonstrate that he too was capable of making sensible use of every last square centimetre of a limited available space. He paid attention to every detail, from the bathroom soap-holders to the sinks of cooking recesses fitted in hallway closets, or indeed to the elegant proportions of the standardised "communications unit" (the flat number, name-plate, letterbox, peephole) placed on the front doors. He was therefore not outdone by any of his contemporaries when it came to functional analysis and design; it was just that his attention was not concentrated on minimising the use of materials or surface area, and thus he did not plan buildings for use by the hoi polloi.
It seems odd, almost inexplicable, that Kozma received no commissions to design any of the apartment buildings put up during the 1930s in the rapidly emerging New Lipótváros, on the Pest bank of the Danube facing Margaret Island, since all of that housing was privately owned, and Kozma was not blacklisted as far as they were concerned. Was he perhaps perceived to be ultramodern? That is a question one hopes future research will address. One can perhaps best liken his position as a "native outsider" to that occupied by Erich Mendelsohn (1889-1953) in German architecture, there being much similarity (though not total) in their relations to their professional milieu. To the very end Kozma's work retained evidence of his roots in turn-ofcentury craftsmanship, his boundless respect for, and love of, detail; nevertheless, he could not be accused of lacking a comprehensive vision, of allowing the details to distract him from attending to the whole, the balancing of masses. The best proof of his quality lies in the fact that his dwellings and furniture have lost none of their topicality over the ensuing decades. His villas are still much sought-after, and his chairs have not been bettered to this day: they may have been designed with larger spaces in mind, but they still do not take up any more room than is strictly necessary.
The peak years of Lajos Kozma's creativity came in the Thirties, when he produced his main body of work. By the end of that decade, successive anti-Jewish laws (1938 and 1939) had made it ever harder for him to earn his living as an architect. Eventually he, as a Jew, was stripped of his membership of the Chamber of Architects (and thus of his licence to work as such) and his circle of potential clients was also greatly reduced: his sort of clients no longer planned to build houses. Kozma's initial response was to withdraw and write a book about the architectural principles that he espoused, which he was able to illustrate with the practical achievements of his own career. Written in German, this was published in Zurich in 1941, under the title Das neue Haus: Ideen und Versuche zur Gestaltung des Familienhauses, mit Zeichnungen und Fotografien eigener Arbeiten (The New House: Ideas for and Attempts at Laying Out the Family House, with Drawings and Photographs of the Author's Own Work) by the Dr H. Girsberger Verlag. As conditions worsened, Kozma retired to his house in the village of Nógrádverôce, on the Danube Bend north of Budapest, where he kept himself busy by writing about architecture. Not one of these works has yet been published, but the Hungarian Museum of Architecture will shortly be including a collection of his writings in their Lapis Angularis series.
After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Kozma was forced into hiding, and he managed to escape deportation to the extermination camps. After the end of the war, he was able to resume work as an architect. Now, aged 60, he received his very first commission from a Hungarian public institution, a school for the Angyalföld District of Pest. His relationship to the surviving representatives of the Hungarian pre-war avant-garde also improved, with the result that he joined the editorial board of the modernist journal Új Építészet and became president of the Circle for New Architecture. In 1946 he was appointed as director of the Academy of Applied Arts, and he was later finally rehabilitated as a professor in the School of Architecture at Budapest Technical University. However, he was unable to take up his duties as he died on 26 November 1948, at the age of 64, before construction of the School on Gyöngyösi Road had been completed. |
