Kálmán Forintos industrial designer

Kálmán Forintos was born in 1940 in Szombathely, although his formative years were spent in Mihályfa, a village near Sümeg. His ancient noble family was classified as ‘class-alien’ under the Rákosi regime [the Stalinist dictatorship in Hungary, 1949–1956], and as a result of the deportation decrees, the family was forced to move to Budapest. One of the defining experiences of his childhood was the liberating power of painting. He taught himself watercolour technique, often depicting the surrounding landscape and tracing the seasonal changes. Encouraged by his primary school art teacher, he imagined continuing his studies at an art secondary school – although under the political conditions of the 1950s, this seemed almost unattainable. Thanks to the outstanding manual skills and technical aptitude he inherited from his family, and a favourable teacher’s report, he was admitted in 1954 to the furniture-making programme of the Secondary School of Visual and Applied Arts. His teachers included Sándor Babák, a wood industry engineer; the master carpenter and workshop instructor Mátyás Tóth; and the head of the applied arts department, the painter and tapestry designer Sándor Basilides. In modelling and sculptural formation, he and his peers were trained by the legendary sculptor József Somogyi. Already at secondary-school level, students had to specialise within their chosen field, and Forintos immersed himself in the decorative technique of marquetry. Alongside acquiring the woodwork trade, his growing artistic ambition emerged in his technical drawings. These skills later proved invaluable when presenting his designs, especially in bringing three-view axonometric drawings to life with watercolour. Encouraged by Babák, he wished to continue his studies in interior architecture at the College of Applied Arts (now: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest), but his application was returned because the College did not launch an interior architecture cohort in 1958.

In the period leading up to the entrance examination, a decisive influence came from an exhibition of industrial designers’ works, where he saw, among others, pieces by László Karmazsin, Lajos Veres, and Dezső Bozzay. Under this impression, he marked industrial design as his intended specialisation on the application form. The admissions committee hesitated when they saw two alternative specialisations, doubting the applicant’s commitment; however, once Forintos articulated his personal conviction and dedication to technical sciences, the panel received him with interest. The head modelling test was evaluated by Miklós Borsos, who was satisfied with his confident command of structural foundations. Competition for admission was extremely high that year as well: of the nearly 300 applicants, only about 5 per cent were admitted, and in 1958, only three industrial design students entered the programme. His principal college tutor was András Dózsa Farkas, who had a profound impact on all his students. Dózsa Farkas taught by analogy and approached the material world through nature-based observation. For him, the forms created over millions of years by nature served as the starting point for design; he strove to apply the evolutionary logic of form-making in practice. Students were encouraged to search for causal relationships in mechanical problems, placing the perfect fulfilment of function at the centre of their investigation. During his college years, the students also influenced one another. Senior industrial design students – József Cserny, László Dudás, and Miklós Jancsó – studied in the same studio as Forintos, maintaining a constant intellectual dynamism. Industrial design had only recently been introduced as a distinct department at the College, and students themselves played an active role in shaping the emerging discipline's characteristics. Even the professional designation evolved over the following decades: designer, industrial designer, industrial artist, mechanical designer, and finally designer. Because of the conditions of the period – lack of Western or progressive inputs – Forintos sought new stimuli in the most elementary ways. By chance, he gained access to several issues of the English-language journal Design, from which he learned that design shaped the form culture of ceramics, textiles, and other applied arts, and was not limited to mechanical product design. He also obtained censored brochures from foreign design firms; among these, those from Braun proved particularly influential. The product range of international fairs, however, offered little inspiration: copying mass-produced objects held no artistic challenge for students with an innovative mindset.

Throughout his college years, Forintos continued his dedicated observation of nature. He explored ways of translating hydrodynamics and ergonomics into everyday practice. His experiments with abrasion – how waterflow gradually rounds a cube into a sphere – later proved highly instructive when identifying problems in rough surface machining. Structural ideas were spurred by studying walnut shells, seashells and butterfly wings; and in tool design, he drew inspiration from the force-transmission system of the cockchafer’s antennae, or – when designing the efficient processing of propellers – the gravitational trajectory of the falling maple seed. He graduated in 1963 with the design of a telecommunications device, for which he did not need to produce technical documentation. He created a plaster model of a wall-mounted television whose slim frame lacked any control interface. The central design challenge lay in visually reducing the volume dictated by the picture tube; its black–grey lacquer finish recalled Braun's aesthetics. Dezső Bozzay published the diploma project in the Népszerű Technika [lit. Popular technology, Hungarian science and technology magazine] in the column Szépség az Iparban ( lit. Beauty in Industry), which soon caught the attention of a young engineer at the Elektronikus Mérőkészülékek Gyára (Electronic Measuring Instruments Factory).

After graduating, Forintos became a member of the Művészeti Alap (Art Fund) and worked as an intellectual freelancer, seeking assignments from small industrial cooperatives and from the stands of international trade fairs. His career focused primarily on the design of capital goods rather than consumer items; thus, his products were mostly accessible only to those employed in industry, and although the wider public used his designs, it remained unaware of their creator. Entries for the Formatervezési Nívódíj (Design Merit Award) competitions were submitted by the commissioning companies. The Electronic Measuring Instruments Factory aimed to have its products' formal execution carried out in-house. Forintos designed a desktop calculator that remained available on the domestic market for several years. The prevailing mindset of the era favoured the cheapest materials and simplest technologies, so the constraints of adaptation and the absence of room for idealistic experimentation strongly limited his design freedom. The slanted display surfaces of desktop calculators reflected overhead office lighting at the time. With a protractor and mirror, Forintos devised a light-trap: he recessed the display into a matte-black, V-shaped counterslope and positioned the panel at an angle that ensured flawless legibility. He also overcame the limitations of control interfaces by designing custom-made families of push-buttons.

Parallel to his work in industry, he received commissions from the Mechanikai Gépgyártó Szövetkezet (Mechanical Machine-Building Cooperative), where the foundry allowed for more refined plastic modelling. The cooperative collaborated with Hungarian film and television studios, which otherwise imported camera pedestals at high cost. The Mechanikai Gépgyártó Szövetkezet was the first to manufacture such equipment in Hungary. The crucial requirement was to facilitate the cameraman’s work: the device had to be firmly fixed yet freely movable in all directions. While designing industrial and workplace equipment, Forintos also received continual commissions from the Fővárosi Finommechanikai Vállalat (Budapest Precision Mechanics Company) to design small objects such as light switches, zips, and doorbells. The efficiency of traditional wall-mounted doorbells was impaired because dust accumulated on their downward-facing bells; Forintos solved this by turning the bell upwards and enclosing it from above. Modern materials were used in the plastic injection-moulded transformer casing, to which the bronze-coloured, anodised bell was attached.

All the state enterprises Forintos had worked with ceased operation after the political transition of 1989–1990, and with them, his commissions also disappeared. During the interim period, he worked as a graphic designer, creating packaging, logos, and business cards. Out of personal interest, he immersed himself in history and, employing heraldry, its auxiliary discipline, began designing authentic coats of arms. The latest manifestation of his artistic ambition is model-making, in which he has achieved significant national success.

[2016]