Mihály Balázs is a Ybl Prize-winning, Kossuth Prize-winning, Prima Primissima Prize-winning architect, university professor, a leading figure in contemporary Hungarian architecture. Thanks to his public and academic engagement, he is also an influential voice in the discourse on Hungarian architecture. His oeuvre follows two parallel paths: his architectural activity and his university presence tied to the Department of Public Building Design at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Since 2010 he has been head of the department, and he also leads the Doctoral School of Architectural Design. Since 2012 he has been a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA), and since 2014 a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
His master, Ferenc Török, played a decisive role in the launch of both his teaching and design career. After graduating from university, following a short period at KÖZTI (an architectural firm for designing public buildings) he has been teaching continuously at the university since 1986. He has been working at the Török and Balázs Architects Studio since 1992 at his own Balázs Mihály Architectural Studio since 2011. Over his career, he has designed almost every important type of public building, from the smallest (interior) scale to the largest, which is the Alba Arena multifunctional hall in Székesfehérvár, currently under design.
Despite his engagement with major public buildings, his personality is perhaps closest to smaller-scale works created for well-defined communities: churches, schools. His empathy towards local culture, circumstances and lifestyles becomes evident both in his buildings and publications. His social sensitivity is clearly reflected in the choice of topics as a consulant for his theses and dissertations. As a consultant to more than 150 young architects, including several prize-winning graduates and doctoral candidates, his influence on the vision of future generations of architects is considerable.
Approach
Despite his extensive experience as a teacher, opponent and lecturer, it would be a mistake to assume that Mihály Balázs thinks about architecture primarily in terms of intellectual arguments or philosophical frameworks. The distinctive quality of his personality is that his decisions are guided by instinctive ideas and clear reasoning derived from common sense. The natural simplicity of his childhood in the Hernád region’s farmland still shapes his everyday life. So, despite having lived in a city since starting secondary school, he retains the natural world of rural Hungary and the values typical of small human communities. This also means that the pluralistic world order that is nowadays present in everything is only a curiosity to an almost opaque multitude of opinions, styles, values, attitudes and theories; he is preoccupied by more general ideas that are far removed from the ephemeral world. As a consequence, his oeuvre is characterised by constant values and clear processes born of palpable shifts. In recent years, his mindset has changed scale: the global problem of overpopulation, the related issues of temporality, security and identity, and the extension of architectural responsibility in the search for ecologically proportionate and sustainable solutions, can be identified as new areas of interest, but also as themes that have been at the forefront of his attention from the very beginning in the study of small communities. The world of the farm and the globe: despite the difference in scale, the two are naturally linked through the individual's search for a place.
Works from the early period of the oeuvre
Observing a life's work that is far from complete, a tendency towards simplification can be identified: the initial, highly complex edits have been replaced in recent years by less gestural, more precisely articulated designs. However, it is not a change of style, and should not be seen as a shift from postmodernism to the new modern trends; the evolution of the oeuvre is a natural, internal consequence, as Brâncuşi put it: 'Simplicity is not the goal in art, but we reach simplicity in spite of ourselves, if we grasp the true meaning of things.'
His first independent works, the churches in Kazincbarcika and Fehérgyarmat, or the family houses in Velence and Tihany, designed in the late 1980s, were still explicitly additive in their construction. The play with basic shapes, such as the circle and the rectangle, can be seen in several of his buildings of the time. The link with the characteristics of local architecture or the tradition of church architecture is expressed with subtle sensitivity and abstract references. Also noticeable in this early period is the horizontal articulation of the façade design, which rhythmically shapes several of the buildings in a way that increasingly tapers towards the sky. This horizontal orientation is further reinforced by the grooving that appears in the cladding material.
Yet even in his more elaborate early works in Paks, Nyíregyháza, and Budapest, it is evident that as a young architect – in the epoch of Hungarian post-modern architecture - he distanced himself from ornamentation as a tacked-on surface, as mere decoration. The aforementioned striving for natural simplicity meant that ornament, when present, arose from structure and material; it never becomes garish, self-serving, a narrative outside the language of architecture. The carefully composed façades of his first buildings simply reflect the joy of design: their creator was keen to play with detail.
The final works of this period are two churches. He designed the Church of the Hungarian Saints, together with his master, Ferenc Török, for the planned World Expo in Budapest. The church, consecrated in 1996, is a complex work both in form and in its meanings, stylistic solutions and symbolism. The 24-metre central space of the church is enclosed by an imposing dome. An axis intersects this dome, articulated on the street façade in the form of a house, as if two buildings, two eras collided. The church rises above a crypt, which evokes the world of the early Christian catacombs, and a parish and a calvary are attached to the complex. The aim, as Mihály Balázs put it, was to "find the right balance between the historical background of two thousand years of Christianity and the thousand-year-old Hungarian Church, and the universal communication, and to express this ideality in space, form and material." In 2015, the reflection on community spaces and the design of the garden was revived. The importance of continuity is also reflected in the fact that Mihály Balázs's former student Dávid Török, the son of his master Ferenc Török, is a creative partner in the current design.
A year later, in 1997, the parish church of St. Imre in a residential area in the north-east of Sopron was consecrated. The building still reflects the approach of Ferenc Török and the additive logic of construction mentioned above, but was realized without Török, in collaboration with Péter Fejérdy. The building complex consists of three large units. The bell tower and community house employ a differentiated use of materials, and their spatial relationships are engaging. The apse of the three-aisled church is east-facing, following early Christian traditions. The church interior is circular, but a linear component is added with the gable roof. The building is closed like a fortress church, with an archivolt-framed portal that evokes historical traditions.
Design of the Matáv building on Krisztina körút
The transformation of the socrealist building of KOGÉPTERV, built on the site of the German Imperial Military School in Budapest's Krisztinaváros, into Matáv (Hungarian Telecommunications Company) headquarters has attracted huge domestic and international attention. The design submitted to the 1997 competition (which he prepared together with Ferenc Török) was based on the architects’ view that the existing structure was fundamentally valuable. The architects recognised the talent of the original designer Pál Németh and the influence of Scandinavian modernism, and therefore sought to transfigure the building with minimal intervention. The courtyard, nearly three thousand square metres in area and sixty thousand cubic metres in volume, was a key part of the design. In the courtyard of this austere, engineer-like building, a generous gesture was made to create the conference room embedded in a landscape-like scenario. The central curved element, the wood and stone surfaces as a whole resemble an archaic image - the memory of a shelter carved into a hill - in the recipient, that is universally accessible and appealing, regardless of one’s education or affinity for contemporary architecture.
This spatial design softens the inhuman dimensions of the courtyard, articulating the directions in a natural way, while the artificial landscape provides an elegantly humorous counterpoint to the building. This space showcases the architectural concept underlying the building’s rehabilitation: it places the existing massive "imperial" building in a new context that makes it reinterpretable and approachable while preserving its values.
Adapting to the new office needs, Mihály Balázs transformed the former narrow, central corridor office spaces with convincing simplicity, focusing his creative imagination on the design of a completely new function. since its completion the new conference room has hosted a number of events of national importance and international conferences, in addition to T-com's own events. In 2000, the building’s reconstruction won a special prize from The Architectural Review. Over the subsequent 17 years, the building has retained its value, demonstrating that its architectural assertions remain timeless and beloved by employees, neighborhood residents, and the professional community alike.
Family houses
The architectural solutions of the family houses built after the 2000s in Törökbálint and Tinnye, and of his own residence in Gül Baba Street, are explicitly concise, precise and still rich in emotion. On the one hand, the bold shapes and proportionality of the spaces and, on the other, the careful use of natural materials make the buildings appealing to those who like traditional architecture and are open to new ideas in contemporary architecture.
The design of the Tükörhegy in Törökbálint was to create a kind of "prairie house", composed of a massive brick core with an asymmetrically attached timber-framed annex. The infinitely simple formula, the concise formal structure, the restrained use of materials and detailing are the result of a deliberate self-limitation. The internal spaces of the house organically turn inwards, open onto a partially covered terrace that can be interpreted as the house’s own private domain. It was not known at the time of design that this inward facing would provide protection not only from the fierce winds and hot summer sun, but also from the wider, increasingly noisy suburban environment.
The so-called “Eszterhill” development in Tinnye was not driven by the expanding housing needs of local residents, but by urban families moving out, which soon made the area heterogeneous in character. The house was designed to defy the emerging streetscape. This “house-shaped house” maintains a dual attachment: conceptually to the archetypal house form, and physically to the still-cultivated farmland spreading out behind the plot. The street and side elevations of the house are therefore enclosed, facing inwards, while the side facing the back garden is open, gazing out onto the landscape in amazement. The structure is capped by a character gable roof of simple form. The interior of the house is well laid out. The living room and its connected kitchen center, like in many rural houses, around a tiled stove. The building was published in several newspapers after its delivery. Unfortunately, in the 2010s the building suffered significant damage.
Between the famous Felhévízi thermal springs and the tomb of Gül Baba lies a narrow medieval street climbing up the hillside – one of the most unique places in Buda. The buildings, very different in age, size and character, are united by the street's unique spatiality. The building on the upper part of the street was given its current form by the reconstruction and extension of a long uninhabited, two-hundred-year-old late Baroque house. The soul of the house is the enclosed courtyard (and the still growing hawthorn tree in the center), which opens onto the living rooms on the ground floor and bedrooms and a studio upstairs. The house, which opens only partially onto the intimate street, compensates for its enclosure with a panoramic view of the city from the gallery level of the studio. The façade's appearance is a genuine reflection of the inhabitants' approach: when the wooden shatters are closed, the house presents itself as a solid wall that completely conceals and protects the interior: it gives no hint of the richness behind it. When open, however, the shutters lend the building a playful, dynamic character, contributing to the ever-changing vitality of the streetscape.
In the design of family houses, Mihály Balázs typically collaborates with his wife, Katalin Somogyi-Soma. This remains the case today: in 2007 they were commissioned to design a house on a panoramic site atop the loess cliff in Paks, and a decade later, in 2017, they completed another on the opposite slope of the hill. Such commissions are thus rooted in the experiences of previous buildings and, typically, the clients have a desire to reproduce the "model house" they had encountered. Nevertheless, in the end, each building will be different in both form and spatial organisation, and will therefore have its own character. This is a natural consequence of the characteristics of the site on one hand and of the long and intensive consultation with the family on the other, which does not end with the drawing up of the final plans but, in all cases, continues throughout the entire building process.
So the ultimate goal is to create a home that is appropriate in every respect - yet the result consistently earns recognition not only from its inhabitants but also from the architectural profession. For example, the Czibula House in Paks was featured on the cover of Családi házak (Family Houses), an album published by Terc. The compact building, leaning against the hill, with an exciting opening towards the horizon, also displays the duality already mentioned for the building in Gül Baba Street. The Paks building can be described both as closed and massive, and yet also as the opposite, since behind the timber shading screen of its main façade lies a house in intense contact with the outside world. The combination of stone and wood surfaces, the spatial organisation, the placement of the openings contributes to the overall effect of the building. It has an excellent way of making an iconic case for contemporary architecture on the cover of a book. The structure of the building, particularly the way it combines the interior and exterior, is reminiscent of the porch of a farmhouse, and thus also links the building to important traditions.
Built tradition
The challenge and task of an individual interpretation of tradition is a theme that constantly occupies Mihály Balázs. Related to the family houses mentioned above, but still as a separate category, we should mention the Szent Család (Holy Family) Community House in Hernád (in collaboration with Balázs Tatár 2010). It is not only interesting because it was built in his home village for its community, but also because it transposes the appearance and logic of the traditional rural house of Hungary’s Great Plain to a small public building. In the structural proportions and façade, and even in its size, the community house blends harmoniously into the village fabric – yet it is able to stand out from its surroundings. A key element in this is the front garden, which establishes a relationship between the community centre and the church. Although the bell tower envisioned for the building has not yet been built, but planning started in 2017 – another sign that the community centre has 'taken root' on the sandy hillside. The reason for this success is surely that Mihály Balázs has never ceased to be interested in the land of his origins. The architecture of the countryside and the natural building practices deducible from the necessary gestures and logics of house-building have been a constant focus of his habilitation work and his university lectures. As an undergraduate, he started from observation: he was interested in the typology of lowland villages, recording in a series of drawings the rural culture that was undergoing drastic transformation. As a university lecturer, he is preoccupied with deeper and more general connections, and in his lecture 'Architecture Is One', which he has given in several venues, he has sought to identify and demonstrate the interrelations between high architecture and spontaneous building. In a forthcoming book, he says: 'A coherent and consolidated architectural world has been replaced by a new era, full of fresh hopes and doubts, limits and possibilities, seemingly denying the old in every respect, avoiding tradition. However, if we approach this architecture with an open mind and a deeper interest, we can recognise in it the traces of centuries of experience. If we stop looking for the familiar form and try to patiently explore all the underlying causes, we can recognise the validity and dominance of the architectural logic. It seems that consistent thinking, experience, and the momentum of instinctive behavior transmit just as much the naturalness of anonymous, vernacular architecture existing in countless variations, as the engineering intelligence and refined beauty of authored architecture grounded in classical culture. This is the architecture of common sense, an era of the recent past that is still to be evaluated, beautiful in its contradictions and full of lessons."
First large public buildings
Balázs Mihály’s first large independent public buildings were for universities. The first was the St. Atanaz Theological College in Nyíregyháza, where the key challenge was to create the silence and contemplative atmosphere required for study, prayer, and scholarly work in spite of its location beside a busy main road. In this building, it is clear to see that the earlier additive construction has been replaced by a reductive approach. The wide array of technologies and materials available today does not promise the architect unlimited freedom or playful experimentation, but rather poses a trap to be avoided: with a restrained attitude, and with consideration for the client, the user community, society, and the ecology of the world, he seeks to narrow the field of play to what is strictly necessary.
A defining moment in the life of the building came when the city, instead of insisting on the prescribed perimeter-block development, understood and accepted the architectural concept, which proposed a large forecourt and a building stretched in a strip through the central part of the site. The college serves three principal functions: from a bright entrance hall that cuts across the entire ground floor, one direction leads to the education wing, while in the opposite direction it connects to a ceremonial hall that can also be used independently; the library and its adjoining seminar rooms are located in the attic and the tower. The architectural intention was to create a simple but well-formed building, made of durable materials and timeless, capable of expressing the spirit of the institution it houses. The use of materials is deliberately very restrained and homogeneous, typically fired clay and brick. The brick façade is perforated with glass panels on the east gable wall of the library and on the south wall of the main lecture hall, and has a grid-like perforated ceramic panel above the main entrance. The mass of the building, down to the details, is strictly closed and inward-looking. An exception is the eastern façade, which, with the raised hollow gable wall (containing a multi-storey bookcase) of the library, having also a symbolic significance, approaches the height of the houses in the city centre. In 2017, the client once again approached Balázs Mihály with the intention of building a dormitory for students. Thus, the need for continuity and further development appeared at this site as well.
Pázmány Péter Catholic University – Faculty of Information Technology
In most of Mihály Balázs's work, the focus on the necessary and the essential is not only a choice of design approach, but also a consequence: it is a logical consequence of investments with restricted financial means. The scarcity so often encountered in Hungarian building practice is not a discouraging fact for him, but a source of inspiration: it encourages him to strip his designs of all superfluous frills. The Faculty of Information Technology in the eighth district of Budapest is a good example: the north-facing orientation of the computer labs, for example, provides summer air conditioning, and the enclosed massing of the building provides protection.
In addition to the tight budget, the urban context and the existing building regulations posed a serious challenge, requiring a small-scale pitched-roof building in the extremely heterogeneous environment of Outer Józsefváros, in the immediate neighbourhood of the considerable size of the 200 m long, 10-12 storey prefabricated blocks of flats on the east and west sides of Szigony Street. It is difficult to relate to these monotonous structures, which feel more like a neutral backdrop than houses. The southern side of the area is bordered by Prater Street, with its well-scaled, once sophisticated but now dilapidated late 19th century buildings. The building was constructed in phases for financial reasons, the first two wings were completed in 2003, the second phase was completed in 2004. Externally the building appears as an enclosed block, surrounded by a wall. On the ground floor, large lecture halls open from the entrance lobby–atrium; the second stage added a refectory and gymnasium. The first floor houses administration, while the upper levels accommodate a chapel, library, laboratories, and faculty offices.
The idea was to create a systematic floor plan that would be able to accommodate constant changes in organisation and educational technology in the long term. This is particularly important given the character of the faculty, as information technology is one of the fastest evolving disciplines. The simple façades and the restrained spatial articulation and massing of the building are intended to ensure that its naturalness encourages a calm demeanour in and around the building, while at the same time representing with dignity the spirit of the Catholic Church and the university. However, despite the apparent simplicity of form, it would be a mistake to describe the buildings of recent years as simple, banal creations. They are dense in terms of their meanings and rich in terms of their spaces. The construction is subtly complex, the spatial relationships are often difficult to identify and are achieved by enigmatic means. It is interesting to note that what appears to be tight and gloomy from the outside is unexpectedly large and bathed in light in the inner lobbies, while on the upper floors the house is completely transparent, as the inner tracts offer an unobstructed glance throughout the floor at certain points. Another such contradictory experience is that, although the university at first sight seems to be an alien body, a block turning in on itself in its immediate residential surroundings, the new building is a nuanced reflection of the built environment. Thus, from a distance, the exterior brickwork of the university and the whitewashed façades on the inside rhyme very much with the firewalls of the turn-of-the-century tenement buildings typical of Outer-Józsefváros. It is not the university that is the alien body here, but the row houses that brutally cut across the fabric of the district. Moreover, if one examines the window arrangement and proportions of the inner façades more closely, it is not far-fetched to discern subtle references even to the architecture of the panel houses. The empathetic embedding of the ITK building in the surrounding area becomes more evident compared with the large-scale investor-driven developments currently taking place in the neighborhood, which are insensitive to the neighbouring ambience.
South Transdanubian Regional Library and Knowledge Centre
The above described problem of a public building placed in a socio-physical environment with an uncertain identity is also encountered in the context of the Pécs library, but this is not meant to be a complaint. Not least because the international tender for the design of the Pécs library within the scope of the Pécs 2010 European Capital of Culture event was won by the design team led by Mihály Balázs. The location and function (the integration of several quite different libraries was complemented by conference and lecture space functions under the name of a knowledge centre) were given as a starting point. The designers saw in this a worthy challenge: through the design of a public institution they could help shape the identity of an entire district. What is the role, the function, the potential of the library in the 21st century, in an age that shares an unimaginable amount of data and information in real time on its digital interfaces? "In addition to its role of accomodating, accumulating and systematizing, the library has also become a meeting point, a community space, a public space in the city. It is a strange contradiction, of course, that in order to achieve this the space of the library must be both open and closed, liberated and tightly controlled, which inevitably shapes and defines the architectural aspects." It is a telling gesture that in his habilitation Balázs presents the building from the inside out – not beginning with the ceramic-faced exterior that meets the city, but expanding outward from the inner space he calls the “hive,” laden with symbolic meaning. "The hive in the inner core of the building is a safe point where the soaring imagination is free. It is a place for meditation, introspection, silence, beauty, ideas – a space of catharsis, carrying us closer to essential truths, where concentration allows imagination to build upon and fertilize acquired knowledge, leading to new creations. Its intimacy lies in accepting, though not parading, the vulnerability of nascent thoughts; it protects them instead. We see the beauty in realizing the idea of the Knowledge Centre through a building whose core is not the constantly changing content of knowledge itself, but rather the possibility of thought: an empty space that can be filled with the ideas of those who enter it”.
The ground-floor foyer and forum open horizontally, in both spirit and function merging with the surrounding public spaces of the city. The upper levels are more inward-looking, according to the activity that takes place there, and are connected to the outside world only visually, through the view of the cityscape and landscape. These two spatial characters are bound together by the all-encompassing “hive,” functionless in the everyday sense, whose vertical axis serves as the building’s conceptual core. Formally, this inner, abstract space is analogical, archaic, organic. The surrounding spaces, by contrast, are the result of rational organization, designed for flexibility and adaptability to change. A further layer of interpretation arises when comparing the building’s exterior surfaces with the inner cladding of the “hive.” While the façade is geometrical in design – forming a sharp angle toward the historic centre, its high-tech glass surfaces veiled by rasters of varying density – the hive’s cladding is a unique, hand-crafted work: a ceramic installation created by Márta Nagy, and artist from Pécs and realized at the Zsolnay manufactory. Local and global, hand-made and high-tech, soft form and geometric order: once again, a polarity emerges, whose complex relationship opens many directions of interpretation. In the complex and demanding process of design and construction, a prominent role was played by the young architect Tamás Tarnóczky, also a former student of Balázs.
Isteni Irgalmasság Temploma (Church of Divine Mercy), Győr- Kismegyer
As we have seen, Balázs Mihály's relationship with established churches is of paramount importance in his oeuvre, and his thinking about public buildings with sacred content, such as churches, can be traced from the very beginning, from his first independent architectural work, the design of the Greek Catholic church in Kazincbarcika. The Roman Catholic church, inaugurated in 2011, is located in the suburbs of Győr, in a zone of family houses, among the houses of Szőlős Street, and, compared to the first works mentioned above, it precisely traces the trend, already mentioned several times, from additive construction to an increasingly precise, reduced and concise formulation. This church is a "simple" hall church, situated on the side of a hill. It is an elongated, gabled brick building with a white plastered exterior and a white brick interior. On its western side, the gable wall rises above the church space, creating an exciting locus where materials, spaces, and communities intersect. The siting of the church is also determined by its surroundings: despite its residential context, the placement is sacral, for the new church is interpreted in relation to the old cemetery on the hillside and the small Baroque chapel on the hilltop, with which it maintains a spiritual connection.
The situation dictated that the church be set back deeply from the street line: the forecourt in front becomes a transitional space between the profane and the sacred. It is important to emphasize this sense of transition, since the distinctive feature of the western façade is precisely that one can look out from the hall towards the street, ensuring a constant visual connection between the two realms. The meaning of this gesture is unambiguous – and closely related to the parish priest’s vision – namely, that neither the religious community nor the building isolates itself from everyday life, but rather remains open, constantly seeking connection with it. It is worth recalling that the creation of transitional spaces is an often recurring architectural concern throughout Balázs’s oeuvre.
The hall interior has an elemental impact: this is achieved not only through its monumental scale but also through the uniformity and naturalness of the chosen materials. Particularly beautiful is the dense vertical ribbing of the wall behind the sanctuary. Brick dominates, complemented by the timber roof structure. The masterful carpentry – including the the homogenity of the flooring, which has a box-like arrangement – enhances the unity of the space, while the light entering through the glazed wall behind the divided front wall and the playfully arranged small windows animates the atmosphere. A closer look at the floor plan reveals that what appears simple is not quite so self-evident: the hall is subtly asymmetrical, its compositional planes slightly shifted relative to each other. This almost imperceptible displacement lends a sense of mystery to a space that at first seems transparent and easily graspable. The church was designed in collaboration with Katalin Somogyi-Soma.
Projects and plans
We could go on at length about the other realized works of his oeuvre, but perhaps it is even more important to devote time to those projects for tenders and plans that were never built, but still were created over the past decade. The significance of these projects is twofold: on the one hand, they extend the thought process to include all the essential functions of public building design; on the other hand, as theoretical works, they ensure that interpretations remain close to the author’s intentions. This is true despite the fact that the preparation of projects for tenders is always teamwork, in which Mihály Balázs typically involves his former students, but in which from time to time collaborators from other disciplines and there ideas are also present.
The entry for the 1997 tender for the National Theatre in Elizabeth Square came 3rd - an outstanding achievement for the number of participants of the tender. An enclosed block in the form of a mastaba was envisaged for the square, whose archaic world would have set it apart from the historicist architecture of Pest.
The complex thinking about the past and the ruins, the approach that starts from reality without sentimentality, but at the same time richly interprets tradition, are important aspects of the Budavár-Kapuház tender for the building of the Honvéd Főpararancsnokság (Headquarters of the Hungarian Army) in Buda Castle (2003, purchased design) or the permit plans for the redesign of the Garrison Church, the tender for the National Memorial Site in Székesfehérvár in 2009 (purchased design).
With regard to museums, several important tenders must be mentioned, three of which were linked to the Liget Project. During the open international competition for the design of the New National Gallery–Ludwig Museum, the proposal criticized the unsuitability of the designated site. This naturally resulted in disqualification – a serious stance given the scale of the investment in the design – but at the same time it contributed significantly to the substantive debate on the site, which eventually led to the annulment of the entire tender and the launch of a new round, placed, not incidentally, on the site originally identified in the submitted proposal. In the subsequent invited competition for the same function, the submitted design explored the possibility of integrating the two museums and thereby creating compactness. The submitted project presented the possibility of the smallest-scale museum building, in which the functions placed on the lower levels would have supported the life of the park as a whole.
The main motivation when creating the plans for the Museum of Ethnography's tender was the zone where the dense urban fabric meet the park, and the presence of the new element and the nearby Kunsthalle building. The richness of the subterranean world and the creation of gardens and interiors of varying intimacy reflected the identified urban character, in which the buildings for the ethnography were rooted.
In recent years, a core group of young architects has formed around Mihály Balázs, who, through numerous competitions, have become accustomed to working together, producing efficient and exciting results in a short time. An important milestone in this collaborative process was the 2012 competition entry for Széll Kálmán Square (3rd prize), which, like the winning proposal, also respected and retained the Fan Building standing in the middle of the square, while not demolishing its adjoining structures either.
Researching and preserving these designs and tender entries – together with the important entries of other architects – would be crucial not only for understanding the oeuvre, but also for interpreting the era as a whole.
Closing remarks
“Caring for place” and seeking solutions that serve the community are integral to Mihály Balázs’s architecture. In today’s world of loud proclamations, this restrained creative attitude is particularly rare – an approach that values lived personal experience over the spectacular eruption of ego. I believe the dynamic quality of his oeuvre, as well as the multiplicity of its interpretations, arises from the presence of dualities often mentioned before: traditional and novel, solid and transparent, introspective and communicative, local and universal, unique and familiar, simple and complex, engineer-minded and artistic, intellectual and emotional. Within his work these cannot be regarded as opposites. Thus, while in his relationship to the natural landscape we may sense the affinity of northern peoples, it is equally fair to say that his handling of light aligns his sensibility with the architecture of the South. Or: it is true at once that extreme solutions are not alien to him (one need only look at the roof pitches of his early works), yet taken as a whole his architecture is strikingly balanced, conflict-avoiding. How is this possible? How can the contradiction be resolved? I think the explanation lies somewhere in the fact that Mihály Balázs’s thinking approaches the central essence of human existence. Instinctively, he focuses on the very essence of architecture – of “seeking a place”; at this level things still belong together, not split into poles but coexisting in an ancient order, like yin and yang, forming a dynamic harmony. In the intellectual uncertainty of our time, it is reassuring that there are architects who stand firmly and naturally on the ground. This alone could establish his success as an architect, yet the mysterious beauty of his oeuvre lies in the fact that somehow Mihály Balázs’s houses seem to reach all the way to the sky…
[Written in: 2017]