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Hungary Goes Organic
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20233 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,690 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
Architecturally speaking, Hungary has already arrived in the twenty-first century, or perhaps the twenty-fifth, or gone back to the seventh. Its new-wave architecture is a startling mix of science fiction, middle-earth mythology, and peasant tradition.
"We want to erect buildings that make us remember our origins and ancestry," says Imre Makovecz, the presiding genius of the country's new school of organic architecture.
Architect Gyorgy Csete explains that the school grew from the dreadful suppression following the Hungarian uprising of 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled in as the world looked on helplessly. "Folk architecture became the base of the architecture of resistance," he says. His inspiration in these dark times came from prohibited populist writers and turn-of-the-century architects such as Odon Lechner, who had led a movement toward a National Romantic style.
In an age when the International style has brought standardization and monotony to the whole world, Hungary has bucked the trend and developed an architectural language of its own. IT is an architecture of waving roofs, undulating walls, virtuoso timber roofs branching like trees and architecture rich in symbolism and full of strange and wonderful building types such as herdsmen's inns and dancing barns.
Organic, says the dictionary, means "capable of metabolism," "showing symptoms of life," or "the characteristics of such organisms." Organic architecture uses mainly natural materials--wood, earthenware, unburnt bricks, reeds,
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