In Hungary, sacred architecture was taboo between 1948 and 1960. In the few years after 1945, the Church was able only to restore and renovate buildings that had been damaged or destroyed in the war or rendered unusable. From 1948, the nationalisation of Church property deprived it of the financial basis of its existence. From then on, new churches could be built only where a previous church had been destroyed or demolished, and even there the original footprint and dimensions had to be strictly observed. During the Rákosi era, church construction virtually ceased.
László Csaba, who graduated from the Piarist secondary school in Budapest, began his career after 1948 burdened by his “clerical past.” His position as an assistant lecturer at the Technical University was terminated immediately in the “year of the turning point,” and he joined MEZŐTERV, where he designed agro-industrial facilities, warehouses, and occasionally schools, residential buildings, and even, on one occasion, a cultural centre in the countryside. From 1954, he was given larger commissions at IPARTERV, most notably the cold-storage facility in Miskolc, for which he received his first Ybl Prize. His command of form was already evident in these commissions, and his sculptural treatment of large-span halls soon made his work recognisable. Within the rather restrictive conditions of the period, however, László Csaba followed an individual path, set in motion, unusually for the time, by a commission from a village community. In 1959, Cserépváralja, a small village in the Bükk region, decided to build a church at the initiative of an enthusiastic parish priest. In the absence of a church, he had previously held services in the local school, but the authorities had prohibited this. Permission was obtained for a towerless building measuring 6 × 10 metres, with a floor area roughly equivalent to that of a classroom, and László Csaba was asked to draw up the plans. The villagers themselves built it communally from rough, uncut stone. The architect also designed the furnishings: the tabernacle altar, the pews and the lighting fixtures.
The church stands on a hillside. Above its walls of red rubble stone rises a slender, whitewashed, tower-like structure topped by a black metal cross. The square-plan building is covered by an asymmetrical roof that slopes down deeply towards the entrance. With virtually no parallel planes, the church seems almost to grow out of the landscape. Its interior is dominated by a diagonal concrete beam rising slightly towards the sanctuary, with the roof sloping away on either side. A huge window along one side floods the space with light. Architectural historian Jenő Rados described the building as “an artistic solution to a sacred architectural task, achieved with the most modest means in a contemporary manner and creating an atmosphere of profound contemplation.” László Csaba asked his artist friends to contribute modern works to decorate the church: Béla Kondor painted the door of the tabernacle, while József Somogyi created the crucifix without a corpus. The villagers, whose tastes were more traditional, later painted over these works and allowed them to deteriorate.
While designing the church at Cserépváralja, Csaba had already formulated the basic principles underlying his approach to sacred architecture: 1. A church should compel those entering it to bow their heads; the entrance should therefore preferably be located at its lowest point. 2. The space should gradually rise from the entrance and reach its greatest height above the altar. 3. The light should also enter most strongly here, emphasising the place of the consecration.
His next commission came through official channels. The continued expansion of the Hollóháza Porcelain Factory required the site occupied by the existing church, which was therefore demolished. As part of the factory’s reconstruction project, the task of designing a new church was assigned to IPARTERV. The factory covered the construction costs, while the state was the client. The church, dedicated to Saint Ladislaus, was consecrated in 1966.
Csaba László defined the church at Hollóháza, a village renowned first for its glassworks and later for porcelain production, through modernism’s idealisation of form. He employed a powerful symbol, an archetypal church form: the image of the tent sanctuary mentioned in the Bible. Three acute-angled triangles of monolithic concrete rise from the hillside. The body of the building consists of two interlocking triangular volumes. The church narrows slightly towards the sanctuary; along its ridge, the second triangle opens above the sanctuary, allowing natural light to pour through the glazed slit into the sanctuary. In front of the church stands a triangular bell tower composed of two rough-surfaced concrete slabs: a bare outline, a slender exclamation mark cast in concrete. The stark contrast between the natural surroundings and the geometric abstraction accentuates the building’s sacred character, and it soon became an architectural symbol of the period. The official political establishment sought to use the church to demonstrate the intellectual openness of the Kádár era abroad, and was therefore generous in its construction. A few years later, on Party orders (following a request by a high-ranking officer of the Warsaw Pact), contemporary works of art were installed in the church: József Somogyi’s corpus above the altar, Endre Szász’s porcelain panels on the gallery parapet, and Margit Kovács’s Stations of the Cross on the walls. Along the steps leading to the church stand porcelain reproductions of István Takács’s Stations of the Cross.
As a result of the ideological opening in Hungary in the early 1970s, churches could once again be built, and alongside Csaba, Ferenc Török, István Szabó and others began working in the field. At the same time, sacred architecture was fundamentally redirected by the Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1965. The Council renewed and modernised the Catholic liturgy, introduced the practice of celebrating Mass facing the congregation, and thereby also directed the architectural design of church interiors towards a dialogue with the faithful. Light also assumed a prominent role in the centralised church space. This modernising development brought about a fundamental transformation in Catholic church architecture.
After the Hollóháza church, László Csaba continued to explore the possibilities of modern church architecture in Hungary and to develop the compositional use of light effects. At Hodász, he constructed the walls from small bricks. The space of the longitudinal church gradually narrows towards the altar, while a clerestory tower above the altar rises over the nave. The church at Nyírderzs has a similar structure, although it has a transept layout. The chapel at Flóra-tanya, meanwhile, drew inspiration from the spatial arrangement of Romanesque churches. The church designed for a housing-estate environment in Kaposvár is perhaps the only church in Csaba’s oeuvre whose form is not defined by flat planes; yet here too, worshippers enter at the lowest point, and the space gradually rises towards the altar, in this case following a spiral until it reaches the cone arching over the altar. This sweeping curve breaks the monotony of the surrounding prefabricated apartment blocks, while the striking form creates a seed-like centre, with a conspicuous intention to foster a sense of community.
The Blessed Eusebius Church in Békásmegyer, consecrated in 1987, once again takes the form of a tent bounded by flat planes. The four corners of the roof descend all the way to the cornerstones, just as Scripture rests upon the works of the four Evangelists. The side walls consist of enormous panes of glass, so that the body of the church is essentially the roof itself. Like the church in Kaposvár, it stands in the middle of a housing estate, and here too the outline of the building mass marks it out from its surroundings. The planes of the tent are not triangular here, but take the form of rhombuses pressing against one another, beneath which the interior rises from every side towards the centre. The altar stands here, set almost imperceptibly back from the exact centre so that, in keeping with the densely populated housing-estate setting, as many worshippers as possible can be accommodated. Natural light entering through the glass walls illuminates the entire interior. The thick, recessed portals set into the centres of the glass walls evoke a characteristic feature of Romanesque church architecture. The wall-like roof structure is clad externally in sheets of copper. Above the altar hangs an enormous snow-white Hollóháza porcelain cross with a crown of thorns, symbolising Christ ascending towards heaven. The baptismal font and the stand for the Paschal candle were completed after Csaba’s death, based on designs by his wife.
His final works of sacred architecture are small-scale developments of ideas explored in his earlier buildings. In the chapel of the Csepel convent, the ceiling arches over the altar like a starry sky, while an opening in the roof directs light straight onto the tabernacle. The winter chapel at Balatonakarattya is his first church to feature a tower; the tower echoes that of the larger summer church, but is constructed in glass, giving it a transparent, airy appearance.
László Csaba’s multifaceted oeuvre left its most enduring mark on sacred architecture. Generations of architects have since grown up following his example, rethinking the contemporary concept of the church in terms of the materials used, form and structure, and in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating other arts into the architectural whole. All this builds on the first steps that he took in Hungary after 1948.
[Written: 2017]