Ferenc Bán’s architectural oeuvre occupies a special place in Hungarian architecture of the past decades. His works are at once individually conceived, yet they also bear the imprint of the characteristic of the period in which they were designed. His buildings and designs are unique, rarely fitting into trends or movements; each is an inventive experiment that boldly embraces the risk of error. “When I think of Ferenc Bán’s architecture, the same thought always comes to mind: freedom,” as Miklós Sulyok once put it [1] – and indeed, in a spiritual sense, all of Bán’s works reflect this creative attitude.
The distinctiveness of his architecture lies in its associative capacity, which allows for free transitions – sometimes even within a single work – between austere structures, adaptations of archetypal or geometric forms, and organic, natural analogies. His concepts are never purely architectural; they are always permeated by an artistic sensibility, often characterized by a sculptural, plastic approach to form. For this reason, his works are difficult to categorize, yet they reveal conceptual strategies that gather related projects around clearly identifiable experimental pathways [2].
"Ferenc Bán is a lonely fighter for universal architectural quality in Nyíregyháza, a small town in a medium size, culturally less significant, and industrially underdeveloped region. Yet the architecture he creates is of universal value and significance. His buildings are characterised by a tectonic clarity of plasticity that stems from the basic framework, an by an often brutally hard, geometric shaping in which the ensemble of elemental forms, reduced to the extreme, is nevertheless held together by a kind of hyper-realistic, poetic vision. After his early works, which were close to Japanese structuralism and metabolism, he has moved towards postmodern eclecticism, refining his tools, without losing his originality and the individual strength of his architectural imagination."[3]
György Szegő’s introduction to the 1997 volume on Ferenc Bán in the Confessions series – which presented the works from the architect’s own perspective – precisely defines Bán’s architectural stance and significance. The milieu of provincial Hungary in the decades before the political transition of ’89, the background of the construction industry that so dramatically shaped architecture, and Bán’s self-determined, ambitious architectural vision together produced a unique oeuvre that is unmistakably his own. Following the 1990s and 2000s, although manifested in fewer realized buildings, his work redefined his sovereign creative world with no less intellectual significance.
According to András Ferkai, “Like Janáky and his contemporaries, he too realized that the level of construction quality in Hungary would only spare those buildings whose character was so distinctive that alterations in detail or changes in materials would not harm their essence. Janáky found this safeguard in structural articulation, while Ferenc Bán discovered it in the large-scale frameworks that form the skeleton of the building.” [4] Indeed, throughout virtually all of his work, Bán was drawn to wide spans and to vast, expressive structures of great dramatic power. Beyond his personal creative ambitions, this was undoubtedly an escape route in almost all periods: unlike domestic trends that relied on craftsmanship or refined detailing, his concepts – built from the structuring, subordination, and juxtaposition of large-scale elements – were by necessity resistant to the inaccuracies and limitations of construction. Yet the explanation for this approach cannot be sought solely in the limitations of the construction industry. It seems as if the structures, the intuitions and subjective compositions of a strong structurality also demonstrated a sculptural, artistic attitude which thought above all in terms of space, proportion, form, and architectural dramaturgy.
It is difficult to classify Bán's works into artistic periods for two reasons. On the one hand, most of his buildings were constructed almost simultaneously in the 1980s; on the other, a significant portion of his oeuvre – including his design for the National Theatre, considered his magnum opus – was never built, and thus can only be evaluated in its design state. Nevertheless, three distinct creative methods can be discerned quite clearly, each encompassing works that may be formally very different but share a similar intent in their architectural concept. The first – and in terms of realized buildings, the most successful – period reveals the dominant influence of Japanese Metabolism as well as Hungarian Structuralism, though never in a pure form, instead producing unique, intuitive structures. The second period is clearly marked by the impact of Postmodernism, not merely at the level of transient detailing, but also through the new emphasis on contextuality – that is, on the scale of structures and their relationship to their environment. Finally, the third period, which continues to the present day, is characterized by plastic spatial collages in which the regularity of structure is typically replaced by a poetic juxtaposition of formal and structural elements with poetic, distant identities.
An early, not realized small-scale plan seems to foreshadow the main characteristics of Ferenc Bán’s later works. The funeral hall in Tiszavasvári, designed in 1966, is a compact structure – an intuitive, plastic, sculptural, and expressively shaped composition by a young architect then studying the work of Le Corbusier. In it, one already finds both structural rigor and compositional discipline, as well as the analogical, narrative mindset characteristic of his later projects (for example, the roof form composed as a reference to the horns of the Hungarian grey cattle).
In this study I will present the most important elements of his oeuvre, without claiming to be exhaustive. Many unbuilt plans and completed buildings lined the path of a creative career in which his most significant and defining projects and buildings were born.
Intuitive structures
In Ferenc Bán’s early works, one can simultaneously observe the ambitions of a young architect at the start of his working career, the creative environment shaped by the construction industry of the time, the movements that could still provide guidance or models during those decades that were, intellectually, a bleak period in Hungary. Examples of such influences include the often-cited Japanese Metabolism and the ideas of Structuralism, which also enriched the development of domestic architecture.
The megastructure emerged in the 1960s both as a theoretical concept and as an urban planning idea. The term was introduced by Fumihiko Maki, who described a megastructure as a framework into which a significant portion of urban functions is integrated.[5] Later, architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote that a megastructure is nothing more than a supporting structure so large that it approximates urban scale and into which residential containers are inserted.[6] The Japanese Metabolist [7] group sought to develop an independent architectural and urban planning system. Their approach was morphological in nature, similar to that of the British Brutalist and Dutch Structuralist movements of the period. Their concepts generally envisioned an “artificial land” in which, while also fulfilling social and societal functions, architectural and urban solutions were proposed to address the tension between a growing population and the limited availability of new building sites. The urban scale met with the smallest unit – the flat: the “residential container,” regarded as the basic element, could theoretically be attached freely in time and space to the infrastructure represented by the megastructure [8], thereby enabling the continuous and flexible evolution of the city. [9]
In the 1970s and 1980s, international trends found their Hungarian resonance in distinctive, unique experiments. Péter Reimholz and Antal Lázár’s Domus Department Store (1970–74) realized a composition of universal ambition [10], conceived in terms of both plastic and crystalline spaces, and in harmony with the building’s structure and function. The term crystalline spaces means flexible, grid-based, homogeneous, adaptable, large-span spaces, while plastic spaces means functionally diverse, subordinate, service-oriented, and generally small-span spaces. The large-span retail halls inserted between the narrow, parallel office tract of the Domus were a pure manifestation of this spatial dichotomy.
A decade later, Péter Reimholz’s Videoton Educational and Sports Center (1985) was completed. Although it already pointed toward Postmodern forms, it is fundamentally still conceived with an emphasis on structural articulation: large-span communal spaces were placed between side wings that extended along the building’s length and could in principle be continued indefinitely. These Hungarian efforts and their emblematic buildings undoubtedly exerted a significant influence on architectural thinking as well.
Ferenc Bán’s first significant realized work – designed together with Attila Kulcsár – was the Balatonföldvár Kurszalon resort club building (1972), which has since been demolished. The design was originally conceived with a cube grid structure and a wide span roof. Beneath the roof, supported by slender steel columns, the static service tracts are clearly distinguished from the flowing spatial system of club rooms, which could be separated or unified with heavy curtains. The building was a clear manifestation of functionalist-structuralist principles, both in terms of structure and spatial organization. Remarkably, it was produced entirely as a prefabricated system in Nyíregyháza (!) and only assembled on site.
The concept was unambiguous, as the designers themselves stated in a contemporary article [11]: “A single space, supported by an adjoining service strip, satisfies the demand for an all-purpose room.” The classification of plan zones and their treatment as distinct structural elements reveal clear affinities with related domestic and international ideas of the period.
Bán’s first large-scale building was the County Cultural Center in Nyíregyháza, whose design and completion were separated by more than a decade. His original competition proposal – developed from Antal Plesz’s intuition – envisioned a structure raised above ground level, supported by two massive pylons and resting on cantilevered double-sided trusses spanning between them. Transverse Vierendeel supports were to be built between the trusses. On the elevated entrance level, smaller halls and offices were planned, while on the upper level – beneath a tension-structure roof recalling Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Olympic building of 1964 – an open-plan hall and communal foyer would have been created. The covered urban space beneath the elevated building was conceived as a public plaza for various events.
During construction, however, a redesign forced by the circumstances replaced the transverse supports by cantilevered box-aisles parallel to the trusses, thereby transforming the first floor into a five-bay structure and compromising the structural clarity of the original concept. While the cultural center’s smaller halls and offices on this level occupied the resulting zones as a flexible, secondary layer, the two larger halls were placed on the second, top floor, no longer flexible but built as two fixed, permanent spaces.
The design concept reflects, among other influences, the structuralist mindset already noted, but much more strongly recalls the Metabolists’ visions of megastructures. As Imre Makovecz put it: “The enormous bridge-torso of Nyíregyháza – the Cultural Center – is an example of this architectural approach (Metabolism), a single word from Kurokawa’s language. … After long delays, belated for its time, it finally emerged as a classic embodiment of the architectural thought of the 1960s, unique in the country.” [12]
The building, to which Makovecz compared the cultural center, Kurokawa’s Odakyu Drive-in Restaurant (Otome, Japan), was completed in 1969. The restaurant’s mass is suspended within a two-storey spatial truss structure. The ambitious formula, pure in principle in the design for tender and undoubtedly connected to the ambitions of Metabolist experiments, was meant as a model alternative to the small houses in the environment doomed to demolition, aspiring to become a new center. Even with the structural modifications that represented a step back from the originality of the initial concept, The strength of its presence did not diminish – on the contrary, it even intensified thanks to the sculpturally formed, large-span, cantilevered monolithic structure.
In place of the abstract concept of a city-scale megastructure element, in Nyíregyháza the goal became the assertion of individuality resisting the era of uniformism. At a time when construction was largely dictated – something that also defined Bán’s later works – by a contractor-driven, prefabricated building technology, the creation of complex monolithic concrete surfaces, representing a significant technological challenge, was considered exceptional. At the beginning of the design, Bán Ferenc was only thirty years old; after the building was completed, he stated: “An aggressive type of building. It was born much more out of the compulsion to prove oneself against facelessness, featurelessness, and the dictatorship of industry, than from the ideology of the studied Metabolism.” [13]
The once surreal structure, emerging from the surrounding single-story settlement fabric, now finds itself surrounded by buildings of equal or greater height, placed in a changed urban position. The former megastructure fragment is therefore interpreted much more as a massive urban object, a witness to a heroic architectural-structural gesture. Its tectonically shaped, board-formed monolithic raw-concrete trusses are dramatic manifestations of both structural logic and plastic shaping. Instead of Metabolism or Structuralism, today the building conveys the elementary belief – in its time still valid – in the operability of architectural ideas and the society- and city-shaping power of concepts, dramatized and rendered in a pathos-laden manner through architectural means.
In a 1991 conversation [14] regarding the building, Péter Reimholz stated: “Here there is some pathetically grand undertaking, which was accomplished.” And indeed, it is as though pathos, solemnity, and heroism, insofar they are expressible through architecture, were inherent to this building, as well as to much of Bán’s oeuvre.
While the prolonged construction of the cultural center was underway, two other significant buildings were also realized. The Sóstó County Training Institute in Nyíregyháza (1972–77), a cantilevered, monolithic reinforced concrete structure, is one of Bán’s most enduring compositions. Its premise and context are entirely different from the cultural center: situated in a hilly, park-like environment among trees, the building houses guest rooms, a communal space, and a conference hall. Resting on twin cantilevered “T”-shaped longitudinal wall-beams, reinforced concrete slabs cover the cellular spaces, while a steel space frame spans the large conference hall.
The structural dramaturgy of the building is straightforward: the conference hall mass is placed at the end of the cantilever, while the covered space beneath it is a separate part of the park and utilized as an open outdoor area connected to the ground-floor buffet. At the same time, the use of a double-support cantilevered structure, similar to the cultural center, is more akin to the scale of infrastructural works, from which its kinship with megastructures derives. However, unlike megastructures – where a hierarchy of major structure and flexible internal units exists – this building, owing to its functional simplicity, lacks such hierarchy. Instead, its expressiveness arises from its monolithic nature and the dynamic energy of the cantilevered form.
The design, carried out with the consulting support of Antal Plesz [15], aimed to express the dramatic tension between the natural and the built environment. The articulation of the building is functionally clear: the sequential arrangement of room units, then the stairwell and the upper-level conference hall are linked together as if following a formula. The gesture of elevating the great hall above the ground is sufficient for the form, an individual intuition, to become unique, a gesture reinforced by the unbroken articulation of the façade – achieved, for example, through skylighting of the stairwell and corridor.
The TITÁSZ Headquarters (1974–78) is essentially a frame structure, realized from prefabricated elements as a medium-sized corner building in Nyíregyháza. Although part of a continuous street frontage, it asserts its own, autonomous form. The building, which houses a large auditorium on the upper floor and offices and service functions below, can be related to Reimholz’s Domus Department Store – not because of its structure base spatial-theoretical concept, but because of its treatment as a sculptural object. According to Bán, the stepped-back was inspired more by Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York [16].
Here, the possibilities of the frame structure allowed for setbacks of prefabricated parapets, either hung from or suspended on the steel frame; the traces of these suspensions are evident at roof level as steel cantilevers. In several of Bán’s works, one can observe how architectural concepts with links to international currents, striving for universality, due to the construction possibilities of the time and region, led to ingenious, resourceful solutions born of necessity.
The Mátészalka Town Hall (1980–1985) was built after numerous design iterations, following in time the Cultural Center. What all versions shared was Bán’s effort to make a radical distinction between the large spaces required by the function of a town hall (council chamber, wedding hall) and the cellular spaces (offices), regarding their form and structure. The UNIVÁZ concrete column–beam–slab system typical of the era was suitable for the small-span spaces, while the large-span halls were bridged by custom steel trusses. Among the various schemes, this principle was most clearly realized in those where the row of cellular spaces enclosed the large-span halls in a U-shape.
In the built version, the cellular spaces constructed with UNIVÁZ enclose the large-span wedding hall on the first floor and the council chamber on the second floor in an L-shape. As a result, the steel beams, whose direction is legible also in the façade’s setbacks, necessarily rest on a side wall on one side instead of on a full building tract.
The mindset of thinking in structures, in two Nyíregyháza buildings determined by the same contractor and the same technology, turned necessity into virtue in a remarkable way. The House of Trade Unions and Cultural Center (1983–1985) and the Actors’ Residential Building with the Artists’ Café were both defined structurally by the so-called slipform technology. By this method, after the pre-erected steel tube columns were cast in concrete, the plastic slab formwork was lifted to the top level; once the slabs had been cast, it was lowered to the level beneath, and the process was repeated until, advancing from the top downward, the structure was completed.
This technology imposed strong constraint on the formal expression, yet Bán articulated the two buildings with divergent concepts. The House of Trade Unions and Cultural Center – sited perpendicular to and beside the earlier Cultural Center – contained office and auditorium functions, which were distributed into two distinct yet mutually reflective volumes. Bán’s ingenuity was in avoiding the cliché of the “tower and podium” relationship implied by function, instead exploiting the possibilities offered by the technology to create an abstract mass composition: an ensemble conceived as an analogy of a solid and a disintegrating cube.
The office building took the form of a gridded, framed structure built with the slipform technology, its mass clad with a curtain wall. In the case of the auditorium building, after the erection of full building-height steel columns, Bán suspended the roof slab of the great hall from them. Thus, a mass composition emerged that overrode the practical constraints of execution and articulated an expressive architectural ensemble capable of engaging in dialogue with the neighbouring megastructure.
The seven-story building of the Actors’ Residential House and Artists’ Café also required a four-bay steel-frame structure, likewise realized with the slipform technology. The resulting frame is inhabited by spaces in a thoroughly structuralist manner: in some places filling it in, in others withdrawing, exposing, and leaving free the system of steel columns. Three parts of the four-bay plan contain the actors’ rooms, where the recessed loggias made it possible to present the structure with honesty, while the fourth bay is occupied by the stairwell mass, shaped with a curved plan contour and clad in copilit glass. The strategy of revealing and subtracting from the structure is complemented by the ground-floor volume’s attachments – elements extending beyond it, including the café’s own courtyard.
The row house on Ifjúság Street in Nyíregyháza, whose end unit was the architect’s own family residence, was completed in 1985. Bán transcended the cliché implicit in the formula of four identical three-story dwellings under a prescribed pitched roof by introducing a form based on a tilted prism. The conceptual gesture (explained to the client through the analogy of a tilted matchbox) reinterpreted the building’s “house-like” character into a structure theoretically extendable to infinity, while at the same time satisfying the pitched-roof requirements and even enlarging the front garden with the covered-open space defined by the backward-slanting entrance wall.
The horizontal slabs mediate between the blurred boundary lines of the inclined walls and roofs, such that the row-house units evoke the connotations of capsule architecture’s designed modules. The structure thus emerges as determined by an intuitive gesture (the tilting of the matchbox), in essence a fundamental intention to create a new shape.
Bán’s early period can be described as exceptionally productive. Not only did he receive a large number of commissions, but they were also realized. Some of these works – thanks in part to exceptional circumstances – enabled him to create concepts that went against the faceless templates of the era and testified to a wholly individual vision (Cultural Center). Others reflect the tension between universal design ambitions and imposed constraints (TITÁSZ Headquarters, Mátészalka Town Hall). Still others successfully managed to transcend the restrictive technological background of construction in the most innovative ways (House of Trade Unions and Actors’ Residential House). A unique building is the row house on Ifjúság Street, where the spatial concept derives from an analogical, formally motivated idea.
His youthful ambitions met with favourable opportunities, and these opportunities provided an excellent testing ground for the experimental design approach that characterizes Bán’s entire oeuvre. Common to all the buildings of this period is their strive for independence from their environment, their self-determined quality, and above all their strong structuralism. Yet this structuralism does not primarily embody the speculative or theoretically pure relationship between structure and space but rather reflects an intuitive, creative method that regards the megastructure as a tool for creating new forms.
Additive compositions
Many analysts of Bán’s work, as well as contemporaries, have referred to a postmodern turn, most often dating it from the completion of the Cultural Center in Mátészalka. It is undeniable that works produced from the mid-1980s initially reflected more strongly, and later more faintly, the postmodern thinking characteristic of Hungarian architecture of the time [17]. However, this period of his work is much more distinctly marked by a shift in approach, visible also in the field of form-making. Whereas in his earlier works the principal architectural intention was to express a structure rooted in the material framework, the projects and buildings of this second phase – while undoubtedly carrying the formal traits of postmodern thinking – rely much more on the addition of forms of differing identity, often arranged into abstract geometric compositions.
We are not talking so much about distinct eras, but rather about a shift of emphasis. This is vividly demonstrated by the building of the Roman Catholic church in Nyíregyháza-Borbánya, completed by 1982, right in the middle of the period of the previously presented megastructural buildings. In the early design versions, the concept was articulated as a serial structure of five units – most directly recalling Tadao Ando’s church architecture – but in the final design this dissolved into a composition of strong geometric forms. The cylindrical tower that is topped by a square; the church nave with its circular-segment floor plan and negative conical roof surface sloping down toward the altar; and the schematic lattice structure on the façade tying together the nave with the catechism hall – all became parts of a unified formal concept, one that almost evokes the geometric compositions of the Cubists. In these years, something different begins to emerge in place of the megastructures already discussed, and this shift can be readily explained by the special function of the church, but also by its small size and the fact that, unlike state-sponsored projects, it was realized by the congregation itself.
Bán’s architectural thinking is well illustrated by those fictive experimental designs in which he proposed alternative methods of housing construction. These late-1980s projects suggested easily buildable, serially arranged, formally additive structures made from simple materials, often reusing waste products (used car tires, adobe, wickerwork).
“Alongside my work at the design office I tried to figure out how one might create an architecture that was simple, comprehensible, and more responsive to the problems of the time. I did not want to invent nothing scientific, not to innovate, not to strain – just to build as we breathe. … The toolbox is inexhaustible. Is a ray of light any more vulgar for entering through a built-in pickle jar rather than a Plexiglas dome? Is space any poorer if its enclosing structure is not a plastic-formwork reinforced-concrete dome, but one of vine-stake framework with wattle-and-daub infill?” – as Bán put it in an article presenting these designs. [18] This approach can be regarded both as an elaboration of a technological experiment, and equally as a testing ground for another kind of form-making attitude – one that builds from the separation and side-by-side arrangement of structural elements.
The building in which the change in thinking is most clearly perceptible is the Mátészalka Theater and Cultural Center complex (1985–1986). Regarding the transformation and extension of the existing L-shaped, heritage-listed building, Péter Reimholz, a few years after its completion, remarked [19]: “In this building a new voice appears for the first time, which, as we now see, continues to develop in further and further projects, and seems to represent the new Ferenc Bán – one who wants to make us forget, or indeed does make us forget, that great battleship (the Nyíregyháza Cultural Center). … This building marks the first appearance of an entirely changed architectural habitus, a completely altered creative method.” On the one hand, the ensemble displays formal analogies that undoubtedly point to postmodern thinking: the fly-tower’s mass recalls rural granaries; the circular theater lobby evokes Egyptian columned halls; and the initial façade drawings may even call to mind Aldo Rossi’s world. “In the design I mixed the atmosphere of Renaissance, Egyptian, and Szatmár-region churches. Whether that became a mixture or a compound is for others to judge. […] The sequence of labyrinthine spaces created from the relationship of the two buildings (old and new) evokes the atmosphere of medieval towns.” [20]
On the other hand, more importantly, the building displays the intention of seeking and creating context, as it breaks the ensemble into autonomous volumes. As the counterpart of the V-shaped heritage building, linked to it by a bridge and connecting element, a symmetrical composition is realized, in which a new quality of public space is created between the additive elements of the new part (cylinders, prisms) and the existing walls. Like earlier Bán projects, the building is autonomous, yet it guiding principle is more the creation of context. Entry to the cylindrical auditorium volume is gained from the courtyard between the two buildings. Inside, the inclined plane of the seating [21] and its mass – as also later in Bán’s theatre designs – become independent architectural elements. The structure here too was realized with – partly customized – prefabrication, yet the fact of prefabrication is scarcely visible in the architectural appearance. The 2014 reconstruction cleared the building of its postmodern elements (the applied brick architectures, the blind openings of the cylindrical volume) and articulated the necessary new elements (e.g. elevators) as anthracite sheet-metal-clad volumes, continuing the additive composition.
At the Tiszavasvári Town Hall (1987–89) the same duality can be observed as in the concept of the Mátészalka theater: the additive composition of individual elements and the postmodern articulation of details. The task was to extend the existing Party House by adding the functions of a Town Hall. Numerous design variants explored the relationship between the existing and new parts; in the final version a wall-like mass built from prefabricated structural elements was drawn across the front of both the old and new sections, unifying the composition’s side facing the town centre. This new element primarily organized the ensemble, presenting a unified, dignified civic face toward the square, and at ground level established a spatial continuity with a covered-open arcade – later partially infilled. The new staircase was placed in a tower rising in front of this wall-like mass. On the one hand, the project can be described as a composition of architectural elements placed side by side in an additive manner; on the other hand, the shaping of these elements (cornices, moldings, the narratives of city wall or campanile) unmistakably reflects the postmodern attitude of the era, working with historical forms and references. The nature of the addition and the reference-like autonomy of the façade-wall is made evident at the rear, where the “care” towards the main square does not extend and where the volumes of the former Party House and the newly attached Town Hall are revealed. The design variants clearly show the stages in the shaping of the wall and tower – from cylindrical and rectangular variations of the tower, through the ruin-like articulation of the wall’s contour, to the detailing of architectural moldings (crowning cornice, string courses, arched lintels, etc.). This may be the first work in the oeuvre in which form creation independent of structure – albeit limited to the building’s principal façade – assumes a prominent role.
This architectural mindset lived on in two much later designs as well. The plan for Kőbánya’s new city center, prepared in 1993, was Bán’s proposal for a powerful formal reordering of the center and, in a certain sense, of a characterless part of the district. The development, recalling the monumentality of prehistoric Stonehenge, articulated a distinctly postmodern narrative; at the same time, the tower-like buildings and the bridge-like elements connecting them at the roof levels in places formed additive components of the composition.
The building’s formal reference is unmistakable, as György Jánossy also noted in his critique: “That Ferenc Bán returns to Stonehenge is in itself full of allusions, a very interesting idea. The gateway formed by a lintel spanning two stones is something deeply embedded in us. Magnified to an enormous scale, and especially if clad in crystalline material, this double transposition of things becomes a double excitement and a symbolic act.” [22]
The dormitory realized in Debrecen in 1997 stands somewhat apart within the oeuvre, for its austere composition and rational structure are not related either to the expressive individuality of the works that preceded it or those that followed. Yet the additive combination of a regular, square perimeter block and the circular-plan room wings facing the inner courtyard offers a clever response to the loosening and reinterpretation of the central-corridor structure.
This design can also be understood as an almost urbanistic gesture: the circular courtyard articulated with mounds, the masses of the room units arranged in straight and curved plan wings, and the differentiation of the top floor of the three-story building with sheet-metal cladding all demonstrate a mode of architectural thinking akin to that of the Borbánya church or the massing of the Mátészalka theater. Chronologically, this work lies at a great distance from those projects, yet the kinship is striking.
Bán’s creative method, during the fertile period of the 1980s, underwent a perceptible shift. On the one hand, postmodern formal traits characteristic of that era – appearing also in the works of his contemporaries in differing ways depending on temperament – emerged in his buildings, most conspicuously in the Mátészalka theater and the Tiszavasvári town hall. At the same time, the earlier strategy based on the intuitive inhabitation and shaping of structures was replaced (or, more precisely in some cases, supplemented) by the juxtaposition and addition of geometric or archetypal forms. In the case of the Borbánya church, one can clearly speak of a spatial geometric composition, whereas in the Mátészalka theater the same mode of formal expression is complemented by a postmodern narrative. Similarly, at the Tiszavasvári town hall, the stage-like wall and the juxtaposition of the old and new buildings demonstrate this duality. This kind of design thinking persisted into the projects and buildings of the 1990s and 2000s, only with shifted emphases: the juxtaposed concepts coalesced much more into poetic visions, into collages. Yet in this period too there were projects (e.g. the Kőbánya city center) and buildings (such as the Debrecen dormitory) in which additive-geometric form-making concepts became the underlying premise.
Poetic collages
In the third group of buildings and designs belonging to Bán’s oeuvre – most characteristic of his still ongoing period – while retaining earlier affinities, the power of intuitive structuralism, and the traits of additive articulation, poetry appears with greater force in the shaping of form. In these compositions, large-scale personal narratives stand alongside abstract, architectural or indeed atectonic (architectural or extra-architectural) elements and turns, creating collage-like compositions in which Bán’s architectural world, rich in associations and autonomous visions, is more palpable than ever before. His architecture reveals the formative power of the organic origins of form. Abstracted natural shapes and explicit imitations of organic forms (hills, cocoons, forked-tree constructions, etc.) emerge and in some projects of this period become decisive. Paradoxically, this period of more than two decades has manifested in fewer built works; nevertheless, the projects and realized buildings produced during this time best characterize Bán’s unique mode of thought.
The first project that by its nature offered the primary appearance of a mindset based on formal associations was the 1990 competition entry for what would later become the Seville pavilion.[23] The concept for the world exposition pavilion was formulated as a collage of elements of differing identities. The two-story green mound (containing exhibition halls and service functions) was at once a natural and an abstract landscape element, from which two towers would have emerged. One tower had a high-tech structure, while the other – citing the church towers of the Szatmár region – was timber-framed, and this duality was intended by Bán to express the dichotomy (homeland or progress) that has characterized the country’s situation in almost every era. The mound, which according to the designer also evoked the ancient kunhalom burial mounds, was conceived as permeable: inside, the pavilion’s functions were set between a slanted-raster load-bearing system, while its ceiling was pierced by glass prisms. “This building came so easily; in essence it contains many things, many buildings I have worked on so far, that I would have liked to realize. I tried to use elements that make it unambiguous that this is a Hungarian pavilion, that clearly express as well that this is a building characteristic of the end of the 20th century. It is a fresh thing, and yet not, a building, and yet not.” [24] – as Bán phrased it in an interview. The richness and wide range of associations observable in the concept (natural mound, kunhalom reference, stylized Szatmár tower, abstract glass prisms, columns with capitals supporting the ceiling of the mound, etc.) appear here for the first time with elemental force and freedom – a vision for which the representative and narrative-demanding nature of the world exposition pavilion function provided an ideal backdrop.
In the concept for the later-cancelled Expo ’96 Budapest, the central Hungarian pavilion would have been complemented by seven symbolic houses, each designed by a different architect representing a specific region. The 1993 design – adapting to the radial layout of the site plan – envisioned a distinctive montage, at the center of which stood an exhibition space reminiscent of a traditional búbos kemence (clay dome oven). Visitors would have entered the exhibition space from below, ascending by lift, where a circular panorama projection room would have presented a film about the given region. Covered by a glass roof, the oven-like form would have served as a defining element of the montage-like composition, functioning simultaneously as an interior and exterior space, just as the two side volumes (wall-like and magnified column–beam structures) would have, which were connected underground. Undeniably, these two World Exposition designs – prepared for a foreign and a domestic site – strikingly illustrate a subtle shift in the architect’s creative trajectory, marked by repeated attempts to transform elements from outside architecture and integrate them into architectural form through montage-like compositions.
Following his second-prize-winning entry for the National Theatre competition in 1989, in 1997 Bán – after a new competition was announced for the same site, Erzsébet Square – won the commission to design the National Theatre. While the first design still bore the hallmarks of mid-1980s postmodern thinking in formal terms (ruin-like motifs, references to amphitheatres, cornices, etc.) and the characteristics of additive composition, the 1997 competition entry presented a powerful architectural vision addressing a problem that was complex both functionally and in terms of urban structure. In this concept, structuralism and the juxtaposition of structural elements also appeared, but what became decisive was the brilliant placement side by side of elements of very different origins and meanings. Once again, the function proved especially suited to this design method: on the one hand, it was a significant and representative public building, and on the other, a theatre, where theatricality and dramaturgy are fundamental concepts. The building was to have a plethora of faces, a multiplicity that can be seen as a dual response both to the urban context and to the special status of the theatrical function. The collage-like approach is well illustrated by those drawings in which the vast glass structure enclosing the foyer does not appear, allowing exterior and interior spatial forms to become parts of a single composition.
Bán made the auditorium the defining element of the concept: a wood-clad organic mass, supported by props reminiscent of megalithic columns projecting partly out of the foyer, beneath which an open-air stage would have been formed. The foyer itself was conceived as a monumental flight of steps beginning in the square and culminating in the lobby – beyond its visual role, an unequivocally dramatic way of guiding the visitor, who enters the building. From Károly Boulevard, the monumental colonnades framing and defining the boundary of the deconstructed mass were unambiguous architectural allusions. Toward the bus station by Nyíri–Lauber, the façade followed a restrained perforated-architecture rhythm appropriate to the closed row of buildings, while on the József Attila Street frontage, different design variants incorporated additive architectural forms (such as a ramp leading to the roof level) intended as visual markers in the Andrássy Avenue axis. Inside the foyer, the shell-like elevated mass of the buffet, the web-like structure of the glass wall, and the vast walkable cantilever extending from the studio stage toward Deák Square all played autonomous roles within the concept. “The design is so good it is almost an invention,” [25] remarked one jury member. Construction of this outstandingly original design, which stood out in the competition field, did begin, but shortly after the completion of the basement level, it was halted by political decision. Had it been built – certainly provoking debate – it would have become a defining work in Bán’s oeuvre, one that demonstrated the poetic power of architecture, integrating and surpassing in some sense the results of his work up to that point.
Not long after the National Theatre design, in 1999 Bán created his first-prize-winning plan for the long-vacant infill site at Clark Ádám Square in Budapest. Development of the plot has been hindered to this day by the transformation of the once-rectangular lot into a curved, truncated corner site due to the traffic circle layout. Bán’s response to this contradiction was a composition combining a steel-structured roof supported by a column as tall as a building and set in the middle of the roundabout to mark the former plot boundary, a glass façade following the curved outline, and the remnants of the former (now demolished) Ybl-designed building. The architectural elements employed, and the design method of deconstructing the urban situation, show clear parallels with the National Theatre project.
In the competition entry prepared for the 1999 World Expo in Hanover, the poetic, collage-like quality of Bán’s formal language appeared with expressive force. At the center of the complex spatial composition stood a chalice-like volume raised high above the ground (a motif already present in the buffet form of the National Theatre’s foyer), which would have housed the exhibition program. This space was to be reached by lift from ground level, while visitors would have exited via a freely spiraling ramp. The exhibition hall would have been supported by organic columns resembling branching trees, a motif that reappears in Bán’s later conceptual sketches. The composition would have been further enriched by a forest of bundled straw columns. It is evident that in this design the radical juxtaposition of abstract, nature-inspired, and engineered forms emerged in an experimental manner, clearly linked to the National Theatre project as well.
In 2000 the architect completed his second own building, this time in his native village of Tokaj, on a narrow yet picturesque plot next to a Jewish cemetery. This was the work that afforded him the greatest freedom, a starting condition that resulted in a remarkable lightness and freedom from compromise. On the gently sloping site he placed two cubic volumes: a long, narrow block containing the main living spaces (living room, dining–kitchen, bedrooms upstairs), and an additive volume attached by a neck, housing the staircase and bathroom. The principal block – 3.6 m wide but 25 m long – thus became a liberated spatial composition, its floor following the slope of the terrain: a continuous strip of glazing along this ground connection turns it into one of the building’s main dramaturgical devices.
In counterpoint to the ground’s slope, a roof plane tilts in a single direction and extends beyond the covered interior, carrying two curious cocoon-like forms suspended above, that define the building’s character, and house two semi-open, sheltered outdoor rooms. Within the house – scaled down in proportion to its size and function – everything typical of Bán’s work in this period can be found: alongside the engineer-like tectonic precision, an atectonic approach that allows masses to hover above the ground; a model-like character; the tension between architectural and natural analogies (cocoon, nest, or, as the construction drawings note, “potato”); and the strategy of suspending or propping volumes from above.
The cocoon-like elements pierce through the steel columns and beams of the building as if they were later insertions – structures that had moved in or grown into place. The homogeneous use of pure white gives the house a model-like appearance, reinforcing the impression of a “glass bell” set above but never touching the ground, and reflecting the architect’s ambition that one should feel, while sitting inside, as if sitting simultaneously in the garden. The terrain itself participates in this logic: the brick flooring of the interior extends beneath the covered open space, the stepped floor continues outdoors and finally ends in a pool.
The building is at once individual – unmistakably characteristic of Bán – and, in a certain sense, summative, while also conveying something of the experimental force of small-scale contemporary Japanese houses. This is suggested by its symbiotic relationship with the garden, its experimental spatial interrelations, and the principle of homogeneity due to its whiteness. In the nearly fifteen years since its completion, the building has lost none of its originality or freshness.
The most significant public building of the last two decades of his life's work, the Nyírbátor House of Culture, was completed in 2004. The building, set into a continuous row of buildings, is a theatre, a chamber, a cinema and a flat-floored ballroom, all on a single raised level, in a spatially variable "black box" system. Most of the service functions are located below the auditorium, accessed via a glass wall on either side of the staircase. Bán, as is typical of his previous theatre designs (such as in Mátészalka and the two National Theatre tenders), raised the auditorium and added the necessary representative and lobby areas to the path leading to it. This preparation, this reorienting, uplifting, dramatized entrée is powerful, an experiment in a space of prestigious, celebratory architecture. A huge frame (a proscenium-opening reference) on the street line closes and at the same time opens the enclosure, followed by a dynamic staircase that flows from the outside to the inside, leading to the auditorium entrances. The huge frame simultaneously explodes and continues the cornice of the town hall, taking up the anomaly of the leap of the square wall. The rising foyer after the frame, with the glass wall that bisects the staircase, and the elevator tower and bridge in the lobby space, are clear, albeit transformed, continuations of the spatial organizing elements of the National Theatre's 1997 design. The dynamism of the building’s façade to the main road is the essence of the concept: the public building character is given by the composition of the large forms envisioned and, above all, by the poetic formulation of this path of movement. The entrance gateway and the object-like elements in the foyer (the leaning plastered walls, the masses, the stone-clad stair tower, the bridge, the sheet-metal box on the inside and outside of the studio room, the sloping ceiling planes with their floating effect from the overhead lighting strips, and the staircase space itself) are all sculpturally arranged elements of a coherent spatial composition. The floating, tilting, and overlapping of large objects sets the space in constant motion. The solution is truly poetic because everything that "moves" can also be approached, i.e. the momentum, the movement and expressiveness of the forms and their approach and dwelling in between them is simultaneously true. The set-like elements are strong, and this deconstruction and strange montage of the proscenium opening and the world of providential objects on stage can become an exciting and valid architectural field. A series of natural and basic architectural analogies can be placed behind the house in our minds: slope, mountainside, rock, cave, nest, or tower, bridge, staircase, gate. "All thought, all lightness, an amazingly open and personal space", said Péter Forgách at the exhibition on the building, referring precisely to the uniqueness of the spatial arrangement. [26]
Over the course of more than thirty years, the condition of the Nyíregyháza Cultural Center (Váci Mihály Cultural Center) had made its technical and functional renewal necessary. Several proposals were produced for its reconstruction; in a 2009 invited competition Bán envisioned the building together with a land-art–like theatre hall, sunken into the ground and emerging from it. With the 2014 renovation he was given the opportunity not only to carry out the required technical and functional upgrades but also to take a stance on his own building.
Beyond the necessary interior alterations and the roof-raising required for the modernization of the upstairs main hall, new regulations also made the addition of escape stairs and an elevator unavoidable. Instead of being concealed within the internal tracts, these appeared as independent towers – abstract, sculptural forms – placed alongside the megastructure. These gestures, while addressing practical requirements, also span the entirety of his oeuvre: they live their life next to the fragment of the former megastructure to which they are additively attached – now as imprints of Bán’s architectural thinking in plastic, poetic forms, fused with the vast building-object of the younger Bán who once worked to create intuitive structures.
From the early 1990s onward, Bán’s architectural thinking – though not without precedent and not exclusively – moved steadily toward concepts that combined architectural elements with formal experiments drawn from outside architecture. This shift is vividly evident in his two World Expo pavilion designs, yet in an integrative and most ceremonial form he stretched the horizon of this method’s origins to its widest, within the single project of the 1997 National Theatre. The conceptually purest expression can be found in his own holiday house in Tokaj, where a composition of strict geometric order, in symbiosis with the garden, is poetically counterpointed by two suspended, surreal yet simple amorphous forms.
In Nyírbátor and in the concept for the renewed Nyíregyháza Cultural Center, the poetic ambience emerges through the spatiality of sculptural forms: in the former as a dramatized composition of portal, slope, tower, and bridge; in the latter, as sculpted stair and lift towers set alongside the original structure of his first major building. A number of Bán’s residential designs – some commissioned but unbuilt, others purely fictive – became the freest terrain for this method of experimentation, as in the 2002 vineyard holiday house design, where bedrooms were suspended beneath a portal (later developed into a main motif at Nyírbátor), while the living room was composed into the terrain and a cellar carved into the earth, together forming a poetic composition. Although the turn toward a poetic stance in these projects and buildings is evident after his earlier concepts, which had been grounded first in structures and later in postmodern juxtapositions of forms, traces of those earlier concepts remain visible in every design.
The architecture of freedom
Ferenc Bán's oeuvre is difficult to categorise. His architectural thinking, as reflected in his works, is fundamentally experimental, responding in each period both to the external conditions of commissions and construction constraints, and to his own continuously shifting architectural interests.
His architectural stance is at least as sculptural as it is architectural in the conventional sense of the word. This elemental force of form-making and form-creation led to a radically different design method – indeed, one might call it a school – producing results unlike those of other, well-known and canonized Hungarian tendencies. At a discussion on the regional pavilions for the Budapest Expo, István Ferencz remarked: “In his architecture appear those strong elements that radiate power even when they are of a scenographic nature…” [27] And indeed, what characterizes the entire oeuvre is form –specifically, the power of monumental form – ranging from the large public buildings operating with megastructures to the small holiday house in Tokaj. As Bán himself put it: “I am generally drawn to monumentality that is independent of scale.” [28]
Bán’s architecture is not one of sensual experience or tactile reception. His houses and spaces are animated and interpreted through movement, by the act of passage, by the dynamism of visual perception. For this reason, it is not the details that matter. In his work, detailing is subordinated to form, to the effect of volumes and of the intermediate spaces between them.
The yearning for freedom [29] radiated by Bán’s buildings seems equally true in the sense of the creator and of the viewer. Most of his designs and buildings take an experimental stance, provoking through their brutal honesty and their occasional, sometimes necessary, sometimes deliberate rawness. Yet within this provocation one cannot fail to recognize the intention to improve—what the architect himself once called benevolent aggression. [30]
Almost all his works share the characteristic of structuralism. As Nóra Somlyódy aptly remarked in a critique, most of the works go further still, marked by an inverted way of thinking that reveals structures on the façade or within the interiors themselves (the Nyíregyháza Cultural Center, the actors’ housing, the trade union headquarters, the 1997 National Theatre design, the Tokaj holiday house, etc.). [31] This echoes Bán’s remark in a 1986 conversation regarding the structural state during construction [32]: “I like our buildings better when they are half-finished, before the crust is applied, because afterwards they no longer reveal anything about their construction.”
Bán's recognition in Hungary is an obvious fact, and he has the attention and affection of older and younger generations of architects alike, even if at an important moment the community of colleagues has been remiss in showing professional solidarity. International interest in Hungarian architecture, however relative, has focused on more than one of his works, as demonstrated by visits from foreign architectural groups, exhibitions and international publications.
Bán’s oeuvre is encompassed not only by the construction and later reconstruction of the emblematic Nyíregyháza Cultural Center. Two public artworks, created respectively in the first half of his career and in more recent years, also vividly illustrate the shifts in his architectural-artistic outlook. The 1972 György Bessenyei tomb monument is an abstract, architectonic composition: in addition to the raw-concrete plinth intended to hold the poet’s earthly remains, it consists of a stone block, cubic on the exterior, while the interior is carved in a curvy manner on all sides, an intentional evocation of the spirit of the “hermit of Bihar.” The 2007 Nyíregyháza composition Tree of Life and Cascade is a public artwork conceived by Bán as an organic yet abstract reinterpretation of a tree’s branching structure: the cube-shaped block becomes increasingly dense as it rises upward, culminating in a square, regular basin of water at its top, from which water fell in an even curtain.[33] Both works are powerful, thoroughly architectural, and yet they push against the boundary where architecture meets the visual arts: while the tomb monument is a structured, abstract, geometric composition, the Tree of Life is an expressive, poetic transposition of nature.
In an interview given about fifteen years ago, in the period following the suspension of the National Theatre’s construction, Bán said: “I must accept the fact that I am a mutant. And indeed, mutation is the only guarantee of survival. It is from among the mutants that the founders of generations emerge, those able to live under changed conditions.” [34] This thought could be read in a bitter key, yet its message ultimately reaches beyond the immediate occasion and is unmistakably affirmative: it may be regarded as a kind of ars poetica for his entire oeuvre.
[Written in: 2014]
[1] Opening by Miklós Sulyok, N&N Gallery, Ferenc Bán and colleagues, exhibition September 2001
[2] “Each of his buildings is a strong individuality, independent, unsociable, not comparable even with one another, so many new architectonic experiments; and perhaps it is precisely this experimental character that gathers his buildings into a single family.” in: Csaba Bodonyi: Szubjektív bevezetés Bán Ferenc terveihez, in: Magyar Építőművészet, 1986/4, p. 21.
[3] György Szegő: Előszó, in: Bán Ferenc: Vallomások, Budapest, 1997, Kijárat, p. 7.
[4] András Ferkai: Az utóbbi évek magyar építészetéről, in: Művészet, 1986/9, p. 12.
[5] Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, Washington, 1964.
[6] Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, London, 1976.
[7] The Japanese Metabolist group was founded in 1960 by the architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, and Masato Ohtaka, the graphic designers Kenji Ekuan and Kiyoshi Awazu, and the architectural critic Noboru Kawazoe. Their manifesto, entitled “Metabolism 1960: Proposals for a New Urbanism” (Noboru Kawazoe, Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism), summarized their principles.
[8] An emblematic example of this is Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower building, constructed in 1972.
[9] Ágnes Nyilas: A metabolizmus múltja, jelene és jövője, in: http://epiteszforum.hu/in-memoriam-kiyonori-kikutake-a-metabolizmus-multja-jelene-es-jovoje-1
[10] In Péter Reimholz’s contemporary opinion: “From the point of view of building formation, every spatial program consists of crystalline and plastic groups of space.” In: Magyar Építőművészet, 1972/4.
[11] Ferenc Bán – Attila Kulcsár: Holiday Club, Balatonföldvár, in: Magyar Építőművészet, 1973/1, p. 36.
[12] Imre Makovecz: Bán Ferenc: nyíregyházi művelődési ház, in: OPEION, April 1982, p. 30.
[13] Ferenc Bán, in: Bán Ferenc épületei, in: Magyar Építőművészet, 1984/6, p. 29.
[14] Térjátékok – Conversation on the Occasion of Ferenc Bán’s Exhibition, MTV 1991 (ed. Judit Osskó).
[15] Ferenc Bán: “The complex processes of learning, logical reasoning, and intuitive insight were supervised by the architect Antal Plesz.” In: Magyar Építőművészet, 1978/5, pp. 26–31.
[16] The Whitney Museum of Art in New York was built between 1963 and 1966; its designers were Marcell Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith.
[17] According to Bán himself, the form-rich architecture of James Stirling, one of the key figures of postmodernism, was decisive for his own work.
[18] Ferenc Bán: Lakásépítés másképpen, in: Magyar Építőművészet, 1988/2, p. 17.
[19] Térjátékok – Conversation on the Occasion of Ferenc Bán’s Exhibition, MTV, 1991 (ed. Judit Osskó).
[20] Ferenc Bán: Művelődési ház és színház, Mátészalka (1984–88), in: Magyar Építőművészet, 1989/4, pp. 28–33.
[21] On the sloping plane of the auditorium ceiling, in the foyer, there was placed a work of art by Tibor Bráda evoking the coffered wooden ceilings of churches in Szatmár.
[22] György Jánossy: Kőbányai Városközpont, in: Az „A”-Stúdió ’90 Kft” bemutatkozása, Magyar Építőművészet 1993/3–4, p. 52.
[23] The design competition was won by István Janáky’s “Butterfly House” concept, but finally Imre Makovecz’s pavilion building with seven towers was built.
[24] Térjátékok – beszélgetés Bán Ferenc kiállítás kapcsán, ed. Judit Osskó, MTV, 1991.
[25] Ádám Sylvester, in: Bán Ferenc színháza. Ed. Mihály Vargha, Arturia Bt, 1999, p. 35.
[26] András Forgách: Válaj és Nagykálló között, in: Magyar Építőművészet, 2007/1, p. 53.
[27] István Ferencz, in: Országépítő 1995/1, p. 27.
[28] Ferenc Bán, in: Ferenc Bán: Vallomások, Budapest 1997, Kijárat, p. 12.
[29] See also: “For him, the built environment is freedom fulfilled in self-discipline, the objectification of creation.” In: György Szegő, in Ferenc Bán: Confessions, Budapest 1997, Kijárat, pp. 7–8.
[30] Bán Ferenc, Bessenyi György síremléke, in: Művészet 1974/12, 46.
[31] Somlyódy Nóra: Monumentális felkiáltójel. Kulturális központ Nyírbátorban, in: Átrium 2007/1, 75.
[32] Bán Ferenc, Szerkesztőségi beszélgetés Bán Ferenccel, in: Magyar Építőművészet 1986/4, 21–40.
[33] Until it was removed following local protests.
[33] Until it was removed following local protests.
[34] „Jaj annak, aki észreveszi a ledőlt kerítést" - Találkozás Bán Ferenccel, Interview by Gyula Balogh, in: Magyar Hírlap, Autumn 1998.