Everyone who met Antal Plesz during his long life remembers him as a creator of exceptional individuality. The significance of his oeuvre – quite uniquely in the history of Hungarian architecture – does not lie primarily in his realised buildings, although the few houses that were constructed according to his designs each articulate the spirit of their age through a striking architectural language. Plesz’s influence, however, resided in his personality. His versatility and openness had a decisive impact for decades on the thinking of several generations of architects, acting as an intellectual spark of rare force. In the deepest sense of the word, he was a master – a teacher even to those with whom he never entered into a formal teacher–student relationship. It is no coincidence that on his seventieth birthday the foremost figures of the profession greeted him with personal written tributes, and that his death in 2014 once again prompted a long series of poignant recollections, which now also serve as valuable source material for twentieth-century architectural history. One of his students, Csaba Bodonyi, wrote the following about him: “His comprehensive, profound and philosophical thinking, his soaring imagination, his wise humour, his deep empathy and affection for people, and his extraordinary sensitivity were all coupled with an impressive force of personality. He lived an uncompromising, sovereign life. He was a true human being and an intellectual. For many of us he was a second father; for others, a recurrent source of inspiration – a point of orientation and renewal even in the final days of his life.”
Surveying his oeuvre, it becomes clearly apparent that Plesz’s work successively reflects the most significant questions of Hungarian society between 1945 and 1990. These include post-war reconstruction; large-scale housing construction and the structural innovations associated with it; school building, and later the new architectural tasks arising from the expanding sphere of hospitality; the liberation of younger generations’ modes of thought from the constraints of socialist ideology; the massification brought about by industrialisation and, conversely, the communal forms that sought to counter it; as well as issues of heritage reconstruction and the demands of thoughtful, judicious reuse. Parallel to all this, his entire career was accompanied by an enduring concern for settlement-scale thinking, urban development, and the investigation of new structural technologies.
He was a mentor to such prominent contemporary architectural figures as István Ferencz, Ferenc Bán and János Golda. As a leading figure of the Miskolc intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s, and through his friendships with significant personalities of Hungarian culture and the arts, he helped to integrate architecture – still regarded largely as a technical discipline at the time, as indeed it often is today – into the realm of the arts, presenting it as an art of building. This voluntarily assumed role continues to distinguish him from his contemporaries. Antal Plesz’s place in architectural history extends far beyond his work as a designer; even in his own time he was recognised as an influential mediator of culture and as an innovator who created new paradigms of architectural thought. In his own testament, he articulated the essence of creative activity with clarity: “A work of art is born when a creative individual depicts the world of experience arising from his own particular logic; it is not dependent on means, yet it radiates a magical spiritual freedom.”
He had begun to engage with architecture even before he qualified as an architect. The attentiveness he inherited from his father towards stable, functional and contextually fitting building structures shaped his thinking from an early age. His father also constructed concrete shell structures, and it was here that Plesz’s interest in innovative technologies took root. The post-war reconstruction demanded extensive and rapid building work. Plesz first worked as an unskilled labourer on mining construction in Komló; he later moved to Budapest, where, as an architectural technician, he supervised the safety works carried out on nationalised residential buildings. By the time he graduated from the Technical University in 1956, the large state design institutes had already been established, and in these offices the masters of the older generation – among them István Nyíri, László Lauber, Ferenc Kiss, József Schall and Károly Dávid in Plesz’s case – passed on their knowledge to young practitioners. From them he learned to prioritise quality architecture and versatile structural solutions, in contrast to the spirit of the 1950s, which strove for economy and rigidly rational approaches. He was strongly influenced by the research he conducted together with Ferenc Kiss, during which, in the first half of the 1950s, they surveyed the condition of the rural housing stock. As Kiss’s collaborator he also worked on the manual Gépgyárak tervezése (lit. Designing Machine Factories), which remains unpublished to this day. Through these activities he developed a comprehensive outlook – an opportunity rarely afforded to an architect at the beginning of their career. Alongside his masters, he was able to participate in some of the major architectural projects of the period: László Lauber involved him in designing the entrance building of the Steelworks in Sztálinváros [until 1951: Dunapentele, 1951-1961: Sztálinváros, from 1961: Dunaújváros]; with József Schall he designed four-storey residential blocks at the same site; and he also took part in the experimental design of the box-frame constructions at Csepel–Csillagtelep. The momentum of standard-type design in the 1950s drew Plesz towards structural innovation. His first independent works were likewise standard designs: after qualifying, he designed and built miners’ housing based on nine basic types in Komló – where he had gained valuable on-site experience years earlier as a labourer – as well as in Zirc and Farkaslyuk.
In the 1960s he received commissions for school extensions. In Zalaegerszeg he carried out the enlargement of a technical secondary school using the box-frame construction technology he had previously developed with Ferenc Kiss; in Kazincbarcika he was the designer of a college, while factories and industrial complexes also took shape on his drawing board. In 1964 the Lovassy László Grammar School in Veszprém was completed, featuring a steel roof structure. From 1965 onwards, after relocating to Miskolc, he began to think on the scale of the settlement. In addition to his planning studies for urban development and the design of new neighbourhoods, he developed several housing types and engaged in the design of cylindrical buildings and artists’ dwellings. His solutions revealed his ambition to create versatile structural systems capable of producing high-quality architecture even within the strict financial constraints of the period. In 1977, commissioned by the Miskolci Beruházási Vállalat (lit. Urban Development Company of Miskolc), his ensemble of eight studio apartments was built – an exceptional work for its time, with its rhythm of projecting and receding volumes composed to follow the slope of the street, its multi-level interior spaces set into the terraced terrain, and its expansive rooftop galleries. Here one encounters the ideals of classical modern architecture, in dialogue with the pre-1945 architectural outlook of his masters. All this constituted a singular phenomenon during the era of tunnel-formwork and gravel aggregate prefabricated panels, in a decade of mass housing constructed with poor materials and rapidly ageing, uneconomical structures – and, moreover, in the environment of an industrial city undergoing forced development. It stood as an unmistakable signal marking Plesz’s architecture as the overture to the possibilities of a new era.
In the second half of the 1960s, he entered several international design competitions, with major projects including a hotel in Germany, the Amsterdam City Hall and a new Vienna district. In these competitions, he tested in a European context the particular, structure-oriented, innovative architecture that the conditions in his home country did not allow him to develop. At the end of his time in Miskolc, Plesz's architectural masterpiece, the Hotel Juno, designed for Miskolctapolca, was completed, one of the highlights of Hungarian hotel architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. The hotel building is divided into two masses: the ground floor of the four-storey horizontal building, contains the lobby, reception and public spaces, while below it are the mechanical and storage rooms, staff rooms, and above it a restaurant, a drinks bar, a games room and a club decorated with folk art – typical of the era – with a wide terrace overlooking the lake. The hotel block has nine floors of hotel rooms; it is arranged orthogonally relative to the horizontal building. Installed on a steep slope, the hotel wing rests on a two-span, twin-column bridge to concentrate forces to prevent slipping. For decades, until the fall of communism, the hotel attracted many guests, and the entertainment industry of the area was concentrated here. For Antal Plesz, the Hotel Juno won him the Ybl Award in 1975.
Towards the end of his period in Miskolc, in the mid-1970s, a larger group of architects who had graduated from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) Faculty of Architecture, as well as the newly re-established Master School of the Association of Hungarian Architects (MÉSZ), moved to Miskolc. They sought collaborative work and shared frameworks, aiming to create a commune, and in this industrial city of Borsod, struggling with a shortage of architects, they found a receptive environment. The Miskolc Collective House, completed in 1979, for a time provided the framework for communal life. Not least, they were drawn by the presence of Plesz, already a legendary figure at the Master School. Architects such as János Golda, Csaba Bodonyi, István Ferencz, Mihály Rudolf, and others followed the spirit of Plesz’s teaching. Miklós Sulyok, a scholar of the subject, describes the ethos of this group as follows: “…The architectural outlook of the Miskolc group is in direct opposition to the utopianism of modernity, that is, the pursuit of abstract truths devoid of place, and instead seeks truths primarily approachable through reason. They do not wish to exercise systemic critique in the name of universalist ideals; on the contrary, rather than maintaining distance, they aim to be present. To be present, building from within, following Plesz’s teaching, is first to create the human, then the house. The architectural approach of the Miskolc group is described in the literature as Contextualism, but the term Regionalism conveys a more precise and profound meaning. (…) They were the Hungarian forerunners of what Kenneth Frampton termed Critical Regionalism in the mid-1980s. The criteria Frampton formulated almost entirely coincide with the architectural philosophy of the Miskolc Architecture Workshop [Miskolci Építész Műhely, led by Plesz]: privileging architectural heritage and small-scale design over the utopianism of modernism; assuming the place–form principle, that is, an architecture of constraints; regarding architecture as a tectonic rather than purely visual activity; taking into account the natural factors of the building site; giving equal weight to tactile and visual experience, prioritising experience over information; using local formal traditions without imitation or sentimentality, situating local culture alongside and in relation to world culture; and rejecting the centre–periphery theoretical model…”
For the first and subsequent three generations of architects in Miskolc, Antal Plesz’s architectural approach and way of thinking provided a guiding thread. Following his principles, they placed particular emphasis on constructivity, the importance of structural systems, and the excitement of technological experimentation. His influence, however, was not limited to Miskolc; it extended to the emerging architectural processes in Nyíregyháza at the same time, particularly affecting Ferenc Bán, Attila Kulcsár, and the architectural workshop in Nyíregyháza associated with their names. Without Plesz’s mentorship, it is unlikely that projects such as the Váci Mihály Cultural Centre would have come into being in Nyíregyháza – recognized in Hungarian architectural history as an example of Metabolist architecture in Hungary.
Upon returning to Budapest, he engaged with larger-scale projects, focusing primarily on development plans for the area surrounding Nyugati Railway Station. He continued his role as a mentor, organising a so-called private master school for a professional and social circle formed from students of the Ybl Miklós College of Architecture, which met at a restaurant near his residence in Óbuda. He retired in 1990, and in the following years he elaborated detailed proposals for the adaptive reuse of the Óbuda military amphitheatre’s historic ruins, designing a supplementary hall structure to complement the existing walls and defining flexible spaces suitable for cultural and sports functions, including proposals for local traffic development to accommodate higher loads. In 1998, he developed an urban development concept for his hometown of Sásd, and a few years later he prepared a renovation plan for the Premonstratensian ruin church in Zsámbék.
Despite his extraordinary popularity, official professional recognition came only in the years following the political transition [1989]. During this period, he was awarded the Kotsis Iván Memorial Medal for his teaching activities, received several high state honours for his architectural achievements, and in 2008 the city of Miskolc granted him the Pro Urbe award in recognition of his life’s work. True acknowledgment, however, came from his colleagues and students – and it did not cease with his passing.
[2016]