Pécs, the beginnings
György Csete began his career at the Baranya County Council Design Company, later at the Ministry of Construction’s Pécs Design Company. Around 1972–73 he became a leading figure of the newly founded Pécs Youth Office, where his role in the local community had a dual nature. On the one hand, he carried out independent architectural work tied to his own name but also including the collective; on the other, he provided intellectual leadership for the group, contributing actively to his colleagues’ creative work. His role was primarily in conceptual design, but he also took part in the process of developing plans. Among his works from this formative period, two stand out: the Forrásház (Spring House) built near Orfű, and the Paks housing estate and its buildings, realized under his direction.
Orfű, Forrásház
In the early 1970s, the need for water supply for Komló, whose population was increasing due to the mining of high-quality coal in the Mecsek, raised the possibility of exploiting the karst water resources discovered near the village of Orfű in the North Mecsek. Its exploitation required extracting the water from underground and channeling it into the system of natural caves leading toward the town. For the operation of this technical system – housing the pumps and a transformer station – an industrial building was needed. Designing such a facility in a forested valley was both a technically and architecturally demanding responsibility. Csete responded to this challenge by creating an abstract yet organic architectural sculpture, departing from conventional building forms and fitting into the pristine natural setting.
He organized the facility around a circular axis stretching between the dark depths of the earth and the light of the cosmic heights. The timber-framed upper section – evoking a flower or a spacecraft – gives the impression of detachment from the ground, while the lower reinforced-concrete part suggests the elemental forces of earth – water and molten stone – bursting to the surface. At the same time, it bears the imprint of the wooden structure above, symbolizing both separation and attachment.
The decorations appearing on the exterior and interior surfaces of the building evoke the surrounding landscape, as contemporary transformations of natural forms known from ancient times. In this house, the unique function embodies the reciprocal relationship between human and nature, manifesting as both the intertwining and the separation of the natural elements of earthly existence and the world created by humans.
The complex is an industrial building that has been recognised in the history of world architecture and is one of the emblematic symbols of Hungarian organic architecture. In 2005 it was declared a historic monument. Today it no longer serves its original function, but it is open to visitors. Its condition is satisfactory, although its original character has been significantly altered by the sheet metal cladding covering the wooden exterior.
Paks – Nuclear Power Plant Housing Estate
In the 1970s, the Pécs Design Company was commissioned to design the service housing estate for the nuclear power plant being built in Paks. The assignment included urban planning, the design of public institutions and residential buildings, and the technical documentation required for implementation, including the plans for the large-panel apartment blocks and their components.
The design process essentially unfolded alongside construction. An available model building had to be adapted to the site. However, the prefabricated building was so bleak that even the contractor sought ways to improve the appearance of the houses through simple interventions that would not interfere with the production schedule. Another part of the assignment was to design a developed building type based on, but improved from, the standard model.
Csete recognized the opportunity inherent in the commission. He sought to design housing that, in content and spirit, broke free from the seemingly unshakable dogmas. This intention guided the placement of the residential buildings and public institutions, informed the arrangement of their floor plans, and shaped their volumes and façades. The pebbled façades of the housing blocks were enriched with recessed, white-painted patterns, accompanied by loggia walls, balcony railings, and entrance structures, recalling the surviving traces of the ancient cultures of the Carpathian Basin.
In the improved type, the standard panel apartment floor plan was also transformed: instead of a kitchenette, a proper kitchen was built; instead of a pantry cupboard, a storage room; and a dining space was added. This was large enough to serve – as in the traditional Hungarian house – as the main space of family life, uniting cooking, eating, and gathering.
The sharp reaction provoked by those in power found expression in the so-called ‘tulipános debate’ in the weekly Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature), which was sparked by an article by Máté Major. The political authorities could not tolerate the breach of the barracks-style model embodied in the housing estates: Csete and the Pécs architectural community were excluded from continuing the work, the group was later dissolved, and Csete was forced to leave Pécs.
After Pécs - Halásztelek
The dissolution of the Pécs group did not mean separation for Csete and his colleagues. Their informal and former working ties – though no longer with the same intensity – continued. As a continuation of the group’s earlier experiments with centralised spatial concepts, Csete at this time designed the Catholic church at Halásztelek, consecrated in the name of Saint Elizabeth of the Árpád dynasty.
In the Halásztelek church, he evoked a spatial element used since antiquity – the dome – in an unusual way, laying it flat at ground level. Beneath it there is no separate congregational hall or sanctuary: the whole embraces the congregation and their pastors as a single, undivided hemispherical space. At the very top, an open oculus is sealed with a glazed skylight, admitting light that creates the axis of illumination – a transcendent bond between soul and body, God and humankind. The entering rays of the sun, like a mobile light source, animate the interior – which is radiating infinite calm – with a play of light and shadow.
Here, for the first time, Csete used an entirely wooden structure, in brilliant collaboration with his lifelong creative partner, the architect-engineer Jenő Dulánszky. The skeleton of the dome is a series of circular slices of glued wooden supports, which rotate around a vertical axis to form a hemispherical surface that fits the circular opening at the top. The interlocking beams at their points of intersection create a self-supporting spatial lattice capable of bearing the loads imposed upon it.
Dwelling (hajlék) – Bending (hajlítás)
‘The works of organic architecture are often organized analogously to our word hajlék (dwelling, shelter) – not all, but most of them. The ancient pentatonic melody has the same pattern: rising and falling. Like a hill, or a haystack. From dust it is, and to dust it returns, to use a biblical analogy. Who can declare that a new dwelling must resemble the customary “house” (walls with a roof on top) and not rather a tree, or a pile of stones? […] The bent-structured dwelling is an architectural archetype: it expresses one of nature’s primal laws, erosion, while at the same time evoking traditional Hungarian pentatony. Pyramid-form and musical form at once. The basic formula of organic architectural space.’ (György Csete)
The exploration of forms arising from bending (hajlítás) plays a central role in Csete’s architecture and his theoretical writings. In 1986 he was invited to Innsbruck to teach, where, with the architecture students, he carried out experiments in space and form. They bent laths, strung bows, shaped concave and convex forms. By sequencing the elements, they constructed modelled spaces, or by joining them, created dynamically structured surfaces.
He designed several dwellings that recall this primordial concept of building in different Hungarian towns (Bonyhád, Dunaújváros, Solymár, Budapest, Szolnok). The best known among them is the house built in Szentendre for the goldsmith Mihály Kátai, whose main façade embodies Csete’s prototype form later reappearing in a number of his buildings.
Based on the same architectural concept he also designed more complex, multi-element compositions, such as the Ciprus Csárda (Cypress Inn) in Szarvas or the Gulya Csárda near Balatonszentgyörgy. These too are governed by symmetry and the principle of a central focus: the path of light through the glazed skylight or the usually semi-cylindrical façade window which aligns with the axis of symmetry. Their curved roofs descend all the way down to meet the ground.
Ópusztaszer
There is a tension resulting from bending the supporting structures. The beams enter a prestressed state, and this strain is exactly the opposite of the load-induced one. The beams can withstand the same load as normal, non-prestressed beams but with a smaller cross-section. This gives the structures a graceful elegance, and the buildings that conceal them a timeless form.
This technology offered a new opportunity for Csete to realize his tradition-seeking and sculpture-like architectural ambitions. The form emerging from it first appeared in the Star Church of Kőszeg, followed by the building complex in the Ópusztaszer National Park – one of Csete’s richest creations in both content and appearance.
Among the buildings there are some, including the Church of the Woods, the World Hungarians’ Church, and the yurta-village houses, which are related to the Kőszeg chapel – the frames of the enclosing walls were also built using the bent-timber technology.
The bent wooden elements are arranged on square or polygonal base forms, dividing the building masses into sections that follow these basic shapes. The timber frame formula, outlined on the inside of the segments, breaks the continuous wooden cladding into inhabitable spaces.
At the peaks of the shelter-buildings, he placed skylights imitating star-shapes, and on these are calligraphy-like tower ornaments related to Lechner’s Art Nouveau metal decorations. He also saw possibilities in the bituminous shingles covering the outer surfaces. Patterns formed from dusty, broken colors drawn from nature divide the bent roofs rising from the ground, reminiscent of the colorful patterned ceramic tile roofs built at the turn of the 19th century.
The environment and the guiding elements leading to the buildings are also Csete’s work. His attention extended from the design of bridges, fences, flags, and bell towers to even the smallest details. He also designed the furnishing and decoration of the interiors – the furniture evoking motifs of the time of the Hungarian conquest (895–896) – and, as so often, Ildikó Csete’s textiles enrich the interiors. The architect’s presence spanned the entire process, from participating in developing the exhibition themes to carrying out effective work in construction together with Dulánszky. The result is an all-encompassing proof of continuity: the perfect harmony of content, forms and structures, materials and colors.
In the Mammoth Pine Pavilion belonging to the building complex, a slice of a 1,500-year-old giant Mammoth Pine trunk is displayed, offering a spectacle of the profound layers of our history arranged into annual rings, time as the fourth dimension. Due to its imposing size, it is no longer a museum artifact but an organic part of the building that houses it. The building – perhaps precisely because of the uniqueness of this extraordinary object – was shaped by Csete differently from the others. This is not a bent timber-frame “shelter-house”; its form does not evoke a mound or a haystack, but with its concave side it conveys a breaking upward from the depths, an opening toward the sky. It embraces the symbol of existence and time enclosed within, yet grants it free passage toward eternity, toward the universe.
Csete had already employed the motif of the concave-curved building mass earlier, at the cemetery chapel in Füzér. The dynamic shaping of a concave roof structure reappears later in his church at Tégláskert, Debrecen.
At Ópusztaszer, beyond the peculiar form of the building and its abstract message, the underlying structure is also revealed. The construction recalls that of the Halásztelek church: here too the framework consists of a series of timber elements joined together. But these are not circular arcs; rather, they are straight beams set in pairs, springing from the vertices of a regular dodecagon, opening outward and tilted upwards, where each pair meets its opposite rising from the fourth vertex to close in a point. The result is a figure that can be inscribed within a rotational hyperboloid, its surface formed by interlocking deltoid facets. Despite its different mass, the building does not stand apart from the other elements of the ensemble, since the inner and outer surfaces of the enclosing membrane are treated in the same way as theirs. It rather lends emphasis to their character – as if it were an inverted counterpart of the ‘dwelling’.
Debrecen Tégláskert - church
Csete György’s most recently realized work is the reformed church built in Tégláskert, Debrecen. In his personal statement he begins by recalling the bombing of the Debrecen railway station during the Second World War and its victims, making clear that he regarded the work as his way of expressing gratitude to the city and to the Reformed College for receiving him as a student in his youth.
The roof-shaped church is a Bartókian transformation of the traditional wooden belfries – a reimagining of the tower and its four pinnacles in contemporary architectural language. Its immediate surroundings evoke the tradition of fortified churches, while the ramp encircling the building before reaching the entrance may be read as an allusion to a Calvary path. The composition absorbs and reinterprets the characteristic elements of Reformed church architecture from Szabolcs-Szatmár to Transylvania. Through this shaping of the church and its setting, Csete deliberately sought to express the symbol of unity within the Reformed faith – a community that knows no national borders.
The church is conceived as an undivided roofed space sheltering the gathered congregation. The light-axis, a recurring motif in Csete’s oeuvre, again coincides with the axis of the sculptural building’s central symmetry. Light enters from the tower’s apex, passes through a chandelier evoking the Star of Bethlehem and a transparent floor section beneath the glass communion table, and descends into the lower crypt-like space.
Here, unlike in some of his earlier works, the structure does not assume a dominant role. The octagonal plan is enclosed by roof-segments forming triangular planes. The impression of concavity, familiar from Füzér and Ópusztaszer, is suggested by the pedestal -like hill, the triangular roof forms, and the progressively rising, outward-leaning planes of the pinnacles and the main tower.
The installation and interior decoration are restrained in keeping with Reformed liturgical tradition; the roof-walls are rendered in white. The inner cladding is articulated by a finely modeled latticework derived from the interpenetration of the pinnacles and side planes, spreading across the space in accordance with the downward-expanding tendency of the pyramidal volume. This surface articulation may be seen as the reappearance, in new guise, of an earlier gesture – a single underlying idea manifesting in different forms throughout Csete’s work, from the Forrásház at Orfű onwards.
Reinforced concrete shells
‘Everywhere one must build from what is present near the premises. Farmsteads were built with walls of earth dug on the spot and with reed or straw grown nearby – and when their owners died, they too perished, collapsing and returning to the mother earth. The Chapel of Reconciliation in Beremend was also created on this principle: of stone, cement, concrete – what else indeed, when behind it lay the quarry, and further away the cement works.’ (György Csete)
In 1989, Csete was invited to an international design competition for a museum that was to showcase modern art from Austria, Hungary, and Slovenia, planned for the Peacock Garden in the center of Graz. His concept for the competition responded to its setting in a strikingly original way: he designed a building whose ground plan and massing evoked the shape of a peacock. The most dominant element of the structure – the ‘peacock’s neck’ – was a cylindrical, upward-tapering reinforced-concrete shell tower. On its surface he designed perforations resembling feathers. In one of his writings, Csete traced the origin of this structural idea back to a clay-plastered wicker frame, later fired into ceramic, as in the small Oven Chapel in Kishegyes.
After a detour to Innsbruck, he practises with Hungarian students at Hortobágy the building techniques of the old days, building a mud oven, or – as he calls it – the temple of bread, and bending huts out of reeds and planks.
Beremend, Chapel of Reconciliation (1988)
Since the museum was never built, the outcome of the competition is of little consequence. What is not without significance, however, is the tower, which reappeared in several of Csete’s later works. Such towers appear on the Megbékélés Kápolna (Chapel of Reconciliation), completed in 1998 on the hilltop beside the village of Beremend. The chapel stands on the very spot where, in the early 1990s, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, and German civilians fleeing the Yugoslav war listened to the roar of the guns and waited in hope – for reconciliation, for return, for the continuation or the renewal of their lives.
The chapel’s layout recalls that of Ópusztaszer: a dome-like central congregational space flanked by two towers at the entrance. These towers, however, were not built of timber but of prefabricated reinforced-concrete elements made from stone quarried nearby and cement from Beremend.
By contrast, the houseleek form embedded in the shape of the congregational space, the budding finials crowning the towers and the cross erected before the building symbolize life and rebirth. Through the skylights, sunlight illuminates Ildikó Csete’s brightly colored banners, shining as emblems of the diversity of nations, of their reconciliation and unity.
Kiskunmajsa - Marispuszta, chapel
A tower similar to the one at Beremend, together with its pair – a cannonball-damaged truncated tower – also stands before the entrance of the 1956 Memorial Chapel at Kiskunmajsa–Marispuszta. Their bodies, shaped most like projectiles, are pierced with openings that imitate bullet and machine-gun holes. Upon entering the chapel, visitors are met by a dark ceiling studded with the image of stars – or perhaps once again with bullet-like perforations. On the opposite wall, ceramic plaques bear the names of those executed in 1956; as an altarpiece, a round window opens onto the natural world, its cross-shaped mullion holding a crucifix. The altar itself is a simple four-legged table, covered with an altar cloth designed by Ildikó Csete. Through architectural means, the chapel is a poignant tribute to the memory of the former freedom fighters and of Gergely Pongrátz and his brother Ödön, who rest in its foundation.
Summary
György Csete’s buildings are not houses in the conventional sense: each is a piece of functional sculpture, created from building structures under the pretext of construction itself. Consequently, his buildings can be regarded as works in which neither purpose nor construction is compromised. In this sense, his architecture is formalist, but it cannot be accused of self-indulgence. Every element of his creations carries meaning inspired by the premises, the function, or the intention to create the buildings. His mode of communication is an abstract, multilayered, and subtle symbolism that stirs thought in the observer.
Csete’s architectural idiom is unique. Its origins can be traced to the physical and spiritual–intellectual qualities of his immediate and broader environment. At its center stands the human being, with earthly and transcendent bonds alike. His starting point was the world of traditions preserved in forms across Hungarian and Carpathian Basin culture from antiquity to modern times. The organic elements that decorate his buildings derive from symbols and motifs preserved in folk art. This is why the patterns that appeared on the housing estate in Paks evoked the spirit of the folk–urban opposition. Professor Major questioned the legitimacy of these motifs, citing the retrograde nature of peasant culture; yet the forms appearing on Csete’s buildings were not mere imitations. Through the kind of transformation described by Bartók, these elements were absorbed into his architectural language.
The most characteristic trait of his work is the condensation of the building’s structures into a single element. Instead of separate load-bearing structures, walls, slabs, and roofs, a single membrane rising from the ground stretches between interior and exterior space. The construction pierces its surface, and the decoration follows it in scale and rhythm. The basic form is infinitely simple, yet the solution is never schematic. Dynamism, surface structures tuned to it, and a wealth of detail make the structure human in scale. From this follows that in Csete’s buildings, exterior and interior become one. When he needed interior decorations, he always designed them himself as inseparable, organic parts of the building.
Csete György was never an office architect. His studio – as he called it – was nothing more than an A4 drawing board and a wooden ruler, even when working within the Pécs Youth Office community. He required no staff to process his plans, usually handling everything down to the tiniest detail himself. Yet he was no individualist: he sought and valued the collaboration of creative partners in his work. Thus, the Pécs community became part of his oeuvre, especially the structural engineer-architect Jenő Dulánszky, and his wife, the textile designer and applied artist Ildikó Csete. He insisted that whenever his works and name were mentioned, they too be remembered.
Relatively few of Csete’s buildings were actually realized. Those that were, however, are without exception outstanding works – it is impossible to single out the better or the less good. From the smallest memorial column to the largest building complex, his oeuvre is unified, consistent, and evocative of the creator in every detail. In him we recognize a figure of decisive significance in 20th–21st century Hungarian organic architecture, whose work transcends the borders of Hungary.
Special thanks to architect László Deák.
[Completed: 2015]