The Binding Agent of Architecture

“A bad building is easy to describe and to put into words. A good building is very hard. I stand before it, I love it – and I won’t be able to tell you why.” (Ferenc Callmeyer)

His houses are simple structures: they say no more than is necessary, yet they say it flawlessly – architectural critic Anna Zöldi observes in one of her articles presenting Ferenc Callmeyer’s architectural work.

As a young architect, he placed both his practice and his reflections on the firmest foundations by following and taking as his compass the advice of his former professor, Károly Weichinger – to meet the Vitruvian criteria of architecture with integrity: to build in the unity of function, structure and aesthetics, and to serve each client in the spirit of twentieth-century culture. In this sense he has always understood architecture as service, and his buildings bear witness to that.

He has not merely brought buildings into being, nor – as so often – given older structures a new, more contemporary appearance. A far more complex approach underpins his architectural practice. His designs and their realisation create the spaces of smaller and larger communities; they serve communal existence, and therefore carry a social role.

After completing his studies at the Faculty of Architecture, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, he returned almost immediately to it as a teaching assistant – though not without obstacles. The dean’s office objected to his background: they believed the son of a former colonel in the Hungarian Royal Army might ‘corrupt’ the young. The majority of the faculty, however, recognised his exceptional abilities and rejected the malicious insinuations.

At first he was an external, and later a regular teaching assistant at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Yet the greater part of his teaching career began only after he had spent time in England, learnt English fluently, and was invited to lecture by the university’s English-language directorate: for three decades he taught the design of community buildings to international students.

As a lecturer and later as head of a studio, he worked with many young architects, and he consistently followed much the same practice. The birth of a design was preceded by ‘drawn’ conversations, during which Ferenc Callmeyer would merely sketch the character of a building as he imagined it. His collaborations rested on this: he would transmit the idea, and from the sketches and their further development his colleagues already knew what had to be done, in the given situation, for the building to come to life. Alongside his architectural practice, his teaching also reinforced his reputation at home and abroad; worldwide he is referred to simply as “Professor CF”.

Over a distinguished and wide-ranging career spanning some seven professional decades, he designed public and private buildings alike, churches and schools, industrial buildings and holiday homes; he undertook urban-planning tasks; and, with no less concentrated attention, he created memorials and a visual-art oeuvre.

And the oeuvre is broader still: throughout his career he published continuously; for several years he chaired the editorial board of Mi otthonunk [an illustrated Hungarian monthly magazine on home, lifestyle and building]; and, through his friend László Papp, he was also a frequent essayist for Amerikai Magyar Szó [Hungarian-language newspaper in the United States]. He taught; and he took on public responsibilities in shaping the organisational and ethical frameworks of the profession, at the head of the Magyar Építész Kamara (Hungarian Chamber of Architects) and, likewise, the Házat-Hazát Alapítvány (Housing–Homeland Foundation).

A formative influence on his architectural thinking came in the early 1950s when, on commission from the Országos Műemlékvédelmi Hivatal (National Monument Protection Office), he and his friend László Papp, then also an architecture student, spent their summer leave visiting the decaying vernacular monuments of the Balaton Uplands. His commitment to the region – and to the vernacular architecture that resurfaces in his designs – can be traced back to these journeys. Unknowingly, or perhaps quite deliberately, he and his friend were following in Le Corbusier’s footsteps. Le Corbusier travelled through the Great Hungarian Plain to study the original simplicity and beauty of Hungarian peasant houses; they travelled the Balaton Uplands.

It is around this time that his architectural ideal takes shape – an aproach that would later be embodied in his designs, perhaps most clearly, and earliest, in the Poharazó (Wine Bar): architecture is a form of humility, and therefore responsive to human problems. His experiences led him towards an architecture that is simple, free of overcomplicated solutions – “one in which no one need ask why things are as they are, because every part of the building is there for a reason”.

Poharazó (Wine Bar), Tátika Étterem (Tátika Restaurant)

It is hardly surprising that today Ferenc Callmeyer is known first and foremost for the houses he designed and built around Lake Balaton. A number of now-iconic buildings are associated with his name – for instance Badacsony’s two characteristic late-1950s buildings: Poharazó, the idea of which was way ahead of its time, and Tátika Étterem. His distinctive architectural voice begins with the Badacsony Poharazó, a synthesis of what he had observed in vernacular architecture: it follows the sober simplicity and sense of proportion of the peasantry. To this day he regards the Badacsony Poharazó as his dearest work and architectural ideal, because even decades later he can look at it with undiminished pleasure. Without ever being placed under heritage protection, the owner kept the Poharazó in its original condition – exactly as Ferenc Callmeyer designed it. Its appeal lies not only in the wine it offers; the building itself draws people in.

Within the Balatoni Fejlesztési Program [state-led regional development scheme around Lake Balaton], a building was realised that attracted attention and acclaim not only for its materiality – the use of raw concrete, which was spreading only sluggishly in Hungary – but also for its ‘sculptural exactitude’. One of Ferenc Callmeyer’s early works, the Tátika Étterem in Badacsony (1958–1962), is one of Hungary’s youngest protected monuments. The project expressed the architect’s self-confidence: that he, too, could create a building which posterity might later regard as a monument.

Churches

Ferenc Callmeyer had always intended to design a church. He imagined a sacred space in which one may find oneself – and also that relationship which connects one’s existence with God and the saints.

Over his architectural career he drew up plans for several churches, though most could not be realised for lack of funding. Two, however, were built: the Szent István ökumenikus kápolna (Ecumenical Chapel of Saint Stephen) in Lakitelek and the Rókus kápolna (St Roch Chapel) in Budapest.

“I felt I ought to design a holy place in which it is precisely simplicity that elevates the sacred act, and enables the believing soul to find itself by turning inwards. And we can only find ourselves in a space where there is silence, discipline and light. Only with that awareness can one design a church,” Ferenc Callmeyer remarks. It was in light of these requirements, in that spirit that the concept of the Lakitelek Szent István kápolna (Saint Stephen Chapel) took shape – this small ‘mud-brick cathedral’, one of his dearest works. By then he maintained a close friendship with the client, politician and public figure Sándor Lezsák. A decisive consideration was that the little church should fit its surroundings – that it should be built from materials present in that region. Accordingly, the building material was adobe, reinforced with concrete. Its formal language borrows from the Romanesque, and its proportions follow suit.

A further expectation was that the building should embody and express the belief that when the Hungarians’ ancestors settled in this land, in the ‘Carpathian Homeland’, and created a country governed by the values dictated by Saint Stephen I, they embraced Christianity, they were able to shape it according to their own sensibilities.

Ferenc Callmeyer rightly assessed that in any building where crowds gather – and a church building is especially such a place – it is the architect’s task to create an atmosphere capable of connecting people: so that they become one, so that they draw from one another a sense of humanity. He created a space that helps one recognise that those seated side by side are brothers and sisters, they are all God’s creatures. The Szent István kápolna was made precisely as a setting in which the visitor’s sense of goodwill and mutual dependence may deepen.

When the Rókus kápolna, shot to ruins by the Soviet army in 1956, was later to be demolished, Ferenc Callmeyer joined forces with the local parish priest to save it. They succeeded; the restoration work secured support. Yet a question arose: should the chapel be reconstructed authentically, embedded in its historical period? Ferenc Callmeyer attempted the restoration in such a way that the date of reinstatement would remain discernible – that in the Rókus kápolna we would not see the Baroque building itself, but its further development. This concept once again expressed the architect’s self-confidence: why should one restore the architecture of an age already past, of two centuries earlier, if a contemporary architect can design a building that future generations might also regard as a monument?

This approach was aided by the fact that the chapel had to be restored quickly: Ferenc Callmeyer used relatively few Baroque elements and, moreover, modernised the later, and less successfully made, entrance. The entrance is notable for a semicircular stair that leads down to it, since the chapel floor lies lower; and on the stair’s edge an engraved year – carved into a stone bucket, a planter – marks the date of the restoration.

“Use is the only thing that can carry our monuments over into the future.”

In many cases – for instance the Szily–Fáy kastély (Szily–Fáy Manor House) in Biatorbágy or the Badacsonyi magtár (Badacsony Granary) – Ferenc Callmeyer proposed and prepared plans for conversion and refurbishment rather than the demolition of worn-out buildings slated for removal. The condition, and the price, was always that they should be able to fulfil a function suited to the needs of their time. The chief architect of Biatorbágy, Imre Rumi notes: “One can create something enduring even by rethinking a demolition plan” – as indeed became Ferenc Callmeyer’s practice.

He undertook a similar task in Badacsony with his fellow architect Kálmán Tóth. The listed building, created in the early nineteenth century as the granary of the Tihanyi apátság (Tihany Abbey), could be saved only by becoming fit for new uses. In the 1963 conversion, it was turned into a cinema and community centre, thereby preserving something of the original concept: a three-storey, gabled building with a façade articulated by horizontal and vertical divisions.

A recurring tendency in Ferenc Callmeyer’s work is to make the time of conversion plainly readable within the building: he seeks to register contrasts by integrating modern architectural ideas. In the granary, the internal timber floors that once divided the levels were removed; the space was split with a reinforced-concrete slab. On the former ground floor a glazed reinforced-concrete ‘box’ was inserted to house the foyer and service functions. A cinema operated on the lower level, whilst the upper part contained the community-centre rooms: lecture and workshop rooms, a library and a plant room.

England

The early 1960s offered a more favourable opportunity than before for Hungarian architects to build Western contacts and to become acquainted with Western architecture and its technologies. Through architect Ernő Goldfinger, who came from the Transylvanian Saxon region and was active in Britain at the time, and through his former university colleague Tibor Hübner, the Magyar Építőművészek Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Architects) managed to establish a scholarship in England, under which each year four Hungarian architects could work in British practices. Among these ‘Englander’ architects, Ferenc Callmeyer was placed with the private office of Richard Sheppard, a noted London architect. On the design work for the new Uxbridge campus of the Brunel University, he worked mostly as a detail designer; soon, however, he became one of the group leaders – and could be credited as architect for the designs of the university library, restaurant, and the students’ union building.

His two years of practice, and his work ethic, won the owners’ respect and admiration, and they offered him continued work in London. Ferenc Callmeyer, however, decided responsibly that he would not risk jeopardising the opportunities of the trainees who would travel out after him; and so he returned home.

Back in Hungary he had to face the fact that his post at Iparterv (Industrial Building Design Company) had been terminated. He found new employment through Ernő Hegedűs, founder and director of the Típustervező Intézet (Typified Design Institute), and was immediately entrusted with a prestigious, interesting and challenging task: to prepare the site plan for the headquarters of the Országos Műszaki Fejlesztési Bizottság (National Committee for Technical Development). The piquancy lay in this: of the Art Nouveau ensemble on Kossuth Lajos tér [Budapest’s central square in front of Parliament], only one half had been built earlier; the new design was intended for the empty plot. Yet the building’s forecourt opened directly onto Rákosi’s former air-raid shelter [Mátyás Rákosi – Stalinist Communist leader of Hungary, 1948–1956]. Construction had already begun according to the plans when the state authorities intervened: they refused to approve a project built to the designs of the son of a former Horthy-era officer [Horthy era – regency of Miklós Horthy, 1920–1944].

Housing Estates

In 1966, the competition-winning scheme by Tibor Tenke – Ferenc Callmeyer – Árpád Mester – Tibor Környe would, as a greenfield development, have brought the Káposztásmegyer housing estate into being. Yet, for lack of funds, implementation began only much later, in 1983, and on the basis of different plans. The concept sketch for the estate was drawn by Tibor Tenke on a paper napkin in the canteen of the Típustervező Intézet – as so often, thinking at a laid table gave birth to the most important ideas – in Ferenc Callmeyer’s company.

Tibor Tenke and Ferenc Callmeyer entered several Hungarian and international competitions together; among these, their most significant realised project was the Újpalota housing estate, whose works began in 1969. Urban construction, using the era’s modern material – industrially produced prefabricated panels – opened up, on a mass scale, the possibility of solving the housing question, an unmistakable social demand.

Ferenc Callmeyer participated with great enthusiasm in developing Újpalota’s urban plan. He relished planning a city; seeing how architecture’s simpler forms – such as the doghouse, which for him counted as architecture’s elementary case – take on enormous dimensions at the scale of the city; how buildings provide shelter for people, something they can come to love, and thus, ultimately, a source of good feeling. In a sense, it is from this outlook that Ferenc Callmeyer’s housing-estate architecture might have emerged; here it could have begun.

Here, too, he strove to create an environment one can love: where people do not disturb one another; where one can feel well even when alone. Even in the case of terraced houses, he worked to create buildings – and an ordered environment touched by nature – that could make residents local patriots, as tends to happen more readily in historic towns or villages.

Unfortunately, the application of such principles, and the evaluation of these modest experiences, repeatedly fell away in Hungarian architecture of the period. Páskomliget became Újpalota.

Schools: via schola, ‘the school street’

After the Second World War there was no choice: under political pressure, and as war reparations, Hungary had to adopt Soviet housing-factory technology. Only later, in the 1960s, did an opportunity arise for the Hungarian state to purchase the British lightweight, so-called CLASP building system, which combined steel frames with prefabricated concrete elements and shortened construction times. Having been to England, and later employed at the Tervezésfejlesztési és Típustervező Intézet (Design Development and Typified Design Institute), Ferenc Callmeyer played a major role in the 1970s in introducing the British CLASP lightweight system in Hungary and in translating its possibilities into practice. He used this system in part when building the roughly forty schools he designed; yet in every case he sought a distinctive appearance. The uniformity of the buildings – that outwardly one was much like another – left him dissatisfied. He strove for a different kind of building, individual in character, that would limit and dissolve monotony.

He designed most of his school buildings – which form a network across the country, and even appeared beyond the borders – during his time at the Típustervező Intézet, regarded as the successor to Iparterv. Here they received the most varied urban-design commissions: for example in Újpalota, what had once been Páskomliget, or in shaping plans for Káposztásmegyer. These concepts naturally also included the design of educational institutions.

Before his journey to England, in Hungary he primarily designed steel-structure buildings. A conversation with Sheppard Robson – which also demonstrated how English architects, and architects of different nations more generally, can live a thought through with remarkable intensity – made him realise that, alongside Hungarian construction methods, another possibility existed. His London boss asked why Hungarians did not build from mud – meaning, of course, fired brick. That possibility surfaced later in Ferenc Callmeyer’s design practice, especially in his school designs.

For a short period Ferenc Callmeyer also worked in the United States, where he likewise left his mark. (The opportunity was created by his youthful and later friend, and former university colleague, László Papp, who as a Hungarian émigré architect could count significant successes in the USA.) Here, by chance, he encountered a task previously unknown to him: he received a commission to design a school building. He thought through school life – its possible atmosphere and background – and the means by which it might be optimised. He grew fond of school design, including the creation of university complexes; in time he became a specialist in educational architecture.

He invented – and established – a plan system which he called the ‘school street’ (via schola). In almost every case, the buildings’ formation and spatial arrangement follows a similar idea. He connected the upper floor with the large, generous ground-floor space. As circulation space he did not design a corridor studded with doors; instead he designed a building in which classroom doors open onto a main space, a hub, into which pupils can spill during breaks. Another important consideration was to connect the teachers’ and students’ spaces. Ultimately he sought to advance, by architectural means, the same aim as across his entire practice: good feeling – through spatial arrangement, and through colours and sound, which are also decisive aspects of a building body.

The buildings were made of formable raw brick; in this way he could give each school a different form and identity. He designed roughly forty schools, and indeed there are no two alike. The one dearest to him is the International American School of Budapest on Diana út. The institution type became closely associated with his name, because it follows a distinctive conception and set of architectural principles that consistently prevailed in the educational buildings realised to his designs.

The via schola – the ‘school street’ typology associated with his name – was later adopted abroad as well. And since there had already been an example of this in England, the design of universities increasingly occupied Ferenc Callmeyer too.

Among his public buildings and schools there are some that determined the image of an entire district. A striking example is the Nevelési Központ (Education Centre) designed together with Tibor Remetei for Dunaújváros’s southern district, which housed both a kindergarten and a grammar school. The institutional ensemble formed an axis in the new district, around which the residential buildings were built.

Residential Buildings

Ferenc Callmeyer designed large numbers of both public buildings and private houses (including standard designs for holiday homes and dwellings), though he considers the latter more important. His philosophy of house-building was inherited, in a curious way, from his childhood. It is guided by how the client lives, what spaces their way of life requires, and whether they can truly use the whole building; and also by the sense that the atmosphere of a flat or house should include a good feeling – that it should be lovable. In the design process he always tried to attend to the clients’ needs, but also to their interests: to carry his plans through with a kind of ethical attentiveness, even in the face of difficulties. Alongside this cooperative attitude (towards the work and towards the client), his remark on the profession and its standards also holds true: “To be an architect is a beautiful craft; but the quality of architecture depends on the cultural level of society.”

In his private houses the various spaces connect to one another virtually without doors; thus the circulation corridor becomes an important component of the building. From personal and professional experience he came to believe that the ideal house is yurt-like: it has a centre one can walk around, but no partition walls – at most curtains, which at night separate people from one another. Even in his houses built of stone and brick he sought to realise this yurt concept, with some adaptation: a circulation band that forms a visual unity with the living area separates the bedrooms and wet rooms from the shared spaces.

Memorial to 1956

Already as president of the Magyar Építész Kamara (Hungarian Chamber of Architects), he paid a courtesy visit to a deputy minister – on the third floor of the very building whose arcades had offered him shelter during the 1956 shootings. When it emerged that his host had been there too, he could signal his intention to erect a memorial to those killed in the volley. He personally placed the five-centimetre bronze spheres into the holes of the Ministry of Agriculture building where the bullets had struck.

As no chamber of architects operated in Hungary in the period following the Second World War, Ferenc Callmeyer – as vice-president of the Magyar Építőművészek Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Architects) – urged its creation from 1985, an initiative realised in 1996. The first elected president of the Magyar Építész Kamara (Hungarian Chamber of Architects), established in 1997, was Ferenc Callmeyer. He not only made admission contingent on meeting ethical requirements; he also set as a goal the advancement of architecture’s social recognition and esteem, and the representation of architects’ responsibility towards society. In his view, what kind of architecture can be produced in a given era depends in part on the cultural level of the society in question, and in part on the ethical stance of the architect. He also made the three existing architectural forums self-financing: Közlöny, Építészeti Műhely, and Évkönyv. He resigned his presidency because of the professional and ethical circumstances that developed around the architectural design competition for the National Theatre.

His public engagement was always exceptionally active. For example, during the period of the Transylvanian ‘village demolition plans’ [Ceaușescu’s ‘systematisation’ programme in communist Romania, which threatened the destruction of villages], as executive representative of the Magyar Építőművészek Szövetsége (Association of Hungarian Architects) and of the Magyar Mérnökök és Építészek (Hungarian Engineers and Architects Association), he was one of the formulators of international protest in Stockholm. For decades his architectural and urban-planning articles appeared in numerous specialist and popular journals; he also wrote studies on the architectural use of solar energy, and, of course, on modern school-building – a field in which he became a specialist at home and abroad.

To the extent his strength allows, he remains an active participant in the life of his immediate environment: in Telki’s architectural-professional and cultural, ecclesial communities and in local public life. In the early 2000s he compiled the monograph of his home village under the title Telki ezer éve (lit. A Thousand Years of Telki). Part of the image material consists of his own illustrations. His work was supported by the local Swabian peasantry [ethnic Germans in Hungary], to whom he turned in trust and from whom he won trust in return. He also worked with heraldry: he taught it for two university semesters, and designed the coats of arms of several municipalities, including that of Telki.

Behind this multifaceted and multi-directional creative activity – among which, nevertheless, architecture stands out as the most important – a simple thought works as the organising principle.

He views architecture as leaving a mark – and also as an enduring delight. Throughout his career he strove to create structures and buildings in which one can feel well, and in whose exterior and interior spaces one can also take pleasure. Architectural order – a clarity of arrangement distinct from its surroundings, structure itself – is born as a work of art: beyond meeting the body’s and the soul’s needs, it offers an occasion for contemplation and enjoyment. His designs were born with the intention that, depending on the building material, his works might be seen – and admired – for long decades, even centuries.

The age – with its modern, and ever more modern, technologies – has of course not left Ferenc Callmeyer’s architecture untouched. Yet he considers it more important that any new building, whether it is built from old stones or with the most up-to-date materials, has – if it is made by a true architect – a soul, which is singular, unmistakable from any other, even as it alludes to the examples of predecessors.

This is the binding agent of his art and his moral bearing, and, as he puts it: “One can place bricks on top of one another in different ways. One can do it in such a way that the whole collapses at once. But one can find the method by which the brick remains where it is placed – figuratively even without mortar, though of course you still need a binding material, mortar. And yet: my true binding agent is goodwill.”

[Written in 2019]