István Ferencz's works are inimitable masterpieces, shaped by the power of the creative hand that ennobles ideas. The secret is to be found on the banks of the Sajó: rowing was the defining passion of his youth. After finishing secondary school, he learned the craft of boatbuilding: racing shells, kayaks and canoes were created by his hands, made for creative work. But boatbuilding, with its millennia of history, was not only a lifelong passion but also his first step towards architecture. The young master consciously sought an environment that would help him prepare for admission to the College of Applied Arts. This led him to become a model maker at ÉSZAKTERV, a state-run architectural and urban-planning office in Miskolc, where his first test was working on chief architect Antal Plesz’s Amsterdam City Hall competition project. This encounter was a defining moment in his career: a master–student relationship that grew into a close professional collaboration and then into a deep friendship lasting nearly half a century.
His apprenticeship years in Miskolc ended with his successful admission to the Department of Architecture at the College of Applied Arts, where, already experienced and married, he pursued his studies independently and with great diligence. After graduating with honours (1973), he became a lecturer – later head of the Department of Architecture. He is credited with founding an experimental workshop whose guiding principle was “to move minds and hands together, to invent and implement at the same time”. He was both master and student at once, having returned to Antal Plesz in Miskolc and completing the Master School under his guidance.
His master, Antal Plesz, was an iconic figure of Miskolc’s intellectual life, ahead of his time, who dedicated his life to cultivating people. As chief architect of the Miskolc Design Office, he was a source of inspiration in almost every significant project. Through his disciples István Ferencz and Csaba Bodonyi, a highly influential architectural community with an independent spirit emerged (Collective House – Tamás Noll, János Golda, Mihály Rudolf, Zoltán Szőke, Zoltán Horváth, László Rostás). The Miskolc Architects’ Workshop, taking shape at the end of the 1970s, grew from the nucleus of the Master School at ÉSZAKTERV into a professional workshop within the corporate framework of the time, bound together above all by personal and emotional ties.
A key urban design concept was their award-winning entry for the international competition and seminar Confrontations in Warsaw in 1981 (Csaba Bodonyi – István Ferencz – István Sári: An Experiment Towards a New Method of Environmental Design), which proposed the development of a district in the town of Góra Kalwaria, south of Warsaw. The project’s essence was to replace schematic, externally imposed, mechanical and grandiose interventions with a logic of gradual development, rooted in local history and geography. This stood in sharp contrast to the modernist approach, which sought truth in placeless, abstract theories. Instead, the architects of Miskolc, including István Ferencz, wished to be present, building from within, in line with the teaching of Antal Plesz. As a leading figure of the workshop, considered a forerunner of critical regionalism in Hungary, Ferencz soon received major professional recognition, and together with Csaba Bodonyi, trained a new generation of architects with strong character.
Among his independent projects at ÉSZAKTERV (1973–1990), the most outstanding was the reconstruction of the Flórián Mill in Miskolc (1981), which was also István Ferencz’s first design office assignment. The building and its surroundings were once a characteristic small-town area of the city, with low-rise buildings. In the name of ruthless urban renewal, the area was mercilessly cleared and replaced with ten-storey prefabricated blocks. The mill was still standing, but the commission was to replace it with a food store and a medical clinic. István Ferencz recognised the message of the place and, out of family tradition – his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all millers – he chose not to carry out the assignment in a servile way, but to confront opposition and save the building. As the political and cultural dictatorship sought to reduce the architect to a cog in the socialist planned economy, this commission required a unique strategy that went beyond the party-state’s vision and created real value. After a reassessment of the town planning, the mill was preserved, while the food store and the clinic were placed in a separate building, and even the contours of the former streambed could remain. The mill, now complemented by a small tower, and its surroundings created a city centre that evoked the realm of what “might have been” in the middle of the soulless prefabricated estate, and provided a home for the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra.
The Újpest Cultural Centre (1984) also stands amid prefabricated housing blocks in the 4th District of Budapest. The complex, which includes a multi-purpose hall, an art cinema and workshop rooms, was built on the site of a former residential block, into which a cinema building that had survived the demolition was incorporated. The winning design of the closed competition was based on the idea of creating a vibrant urban space with simple means adapted to financial constraints. The ensemble, which retained the block-like development, also functions as a small-town forum. On the street side, it presents a generous massing, while within the enclosed square the scale of the former Újpest lives on in a complex that turns inward and remains “alive,” independent of the housing estate around it. It is a fine example of the urban design approach of the Miskolc Architectural Workshop.
A significant milestone in the architect’s career was the auditorium of the University of Heavy Industry in Miskolc (1985): instead of linking the existing main building and the new Faculty of Law (1984) with a single two-storey passage, the designer deliberately connected them with two, so that the intermediate space only needed to be roofed over to create an auditorium. It says much about the era that the decades-long absence of a representative space and central hall for an institution of national importance could only be resolved through architectural tactics that circumvented the client. It was a genuine feat of financial and spatial ingenuity to realise the elegant prefabricated reinforced concrete hall within the constraints of the original programme. Thanks to its carefully designed acoustics, the auditorium became not only the university’s central space but also a concert hall for the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra. The catalytic role Ferencz played in these three projects alone brought him national recognition, and in 1985 his work was honoured with the Ybl Prize.
One of the highlights of his career was the Avasi Catholic educational complex in Miskolc (1990–2000), which he won in a competition at the dawn of the regime change. In the middle of the monumental prefabricated housing estate that accommodates 40,000 people, stands a solid building mass only a few storeys high, capable of counterbalancing the brutal surroundings and opening gateways towards the estate instead of turning away from it. The brick buildings (church, secondary school, rectory, convent) frame a chain of squares and courtyards reminiscent of organically grown towns, with the church tower radiating peace and strength at the focal point. The single-nave church, a hall with a flat ceiling inspired by Hungarian Romanesque precedents, ends in a semicircular sanctuary. The considerable wall thickness offered extraordinary possibilities for shaping the interior: the whitewashed walls are enlivened by subtly incised, dynamically playful raw brick surfaces, following the logic of the masonry. Here the decoration is not a mere covering – it lives as one with the wall itself. Slits illuminating the sanctuary and fragmentary round openings on the side walls, which also give the façade its distinctive character, let in natural light. The raw brick masonry, representing timelessness, stands amid the transient grey reinforced-concrete forest of socialist industry. Cornices, unique corner treatments and ceramic elements add further distinction to the brick façades. More than a religious institution, the complex was to become the characterful centre of a faceless district, evoking a world once thought to be lost. “Building begins with building people,” said his master, Antal Plesz. It is safe to say that during the ten-year construction process of the Avasi church complex, the construction workers – once socialised in panel housing projects – under the influence of István Ferencz became proud church builders, living through the drama of building.
The Creative House of the University of Fine Arts (1998) – one of István Ferencz’s favourite works – was created in a completely different setting in the historic village of Tihany on lake Balaton. Whereas in the former cases the spirit of the place had to be established rather than captured, here in Tihany the millennia-old culture, special atmosphere and valuable monuments could be clearly perceived. That was precisely the difficulty and complexity of the task. “Not to wound, but to continue weaving the fabric,” says the architect, for patching afterwards is long and arduous work. On the shore of the Inner Lake facing the village, next to the distinctive columned barn of Tihany, he revived with exceptional naturalness the early 19th-century abbey farm buildings to serve the artists working here in the summer. The buildings blend imperceptibly into their environment, for “being built into something is superior to any other form of visibility”. István Ferencz understood the message of the place, continuing to weave the fabric imperceptibly but with his own distinctive voice. This is an exceptional skill, and an exemplary attitude for a Hungarian architectural profession that often gives unbridled priority to self-serving originality.
In a similar spirit, his smaller-scale residential designs were created from the mid-1980s onwards (Lebuj Inn, Bocskai Inn – Bodrogkeresztúr; family houses – Solymár, Budapest districts III and XII, Sóskút; holiday homes – Szentendre; mansion conversions – Szada, Verseg-Fenyőharaszt, etc.), representing an architectural world of character: sophisticated, functional layouts, well-proportioned masses, artistic shaping and unique detailing solutions imbued with craftsmanship.
In addition to the buildings themselves, the architect’s oeuvre also includes interior design and furniture design, intellectual achievements of equal complexity. István Ferencz was a founding member of the Óbuda Association of Architects and Interior Designers (1987–1999). In their experiments with furniture, they demonstrated the possibility of “self-building” by placing a ready-made product in a new context, retaining its original essence while adding new elements. Besides the conversions of Thonet chairs (1988), the workshop’s most outstanding work is the Károly Kós Memorial House in Miskolc (1983), whose interior was shaped, beyond the existing house’s space, to the scale of Kós’s person and the reality of the continuity between thought and object. István Ferencz’s large-scale, independent interior works also include the interior of the reconstructed Diósgyőr Castle (2015).
As one of the originators of the concept, he was among the eight architects (Imre Makovecz, Péter Reimholz, Dezső Ekler, Csaba Bodonyi, Sándor Dévényi, József Finta, Ferenc Bán) who contributed to the strikingly powerful competition design for the 1996 Budapest Expo, which was later swept away by politics. Later he designed the central square of the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair, and in 2002 he represented Hungary at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale, together with Tamás Nagy and Gábor Turányi, under the theme Next. Curator Miklós Sulyok sought to answer whether it is possible today to create architecture that is equidistant from past and future, conscious of its cultural role, avoiding both sterile nostalgia for the past and utopian reveries about the future, while preserving the values handed down by history and at the same time providing precise and original responses to the architectural questions of our own age. The work of the selected architects, including István Ferencz, and the international recognition of the exhibition itself, demonstrated that this is indeed possible.
In 1993 István Ferencz founded the Napur architectural practice and intellectual workshop, with his son Marcel Ferencz as its leading figure. With their built works (Dagály Swimming Arena, Budapest, 2016) and numerous award-winning, emblematic projects (Puskás Ferenc Stadium, Budapest, 2002; Museum of Ethnography, Budapest, 2016), they have achieved both national and international success and recognition.
István Ferencz’s architecture cannot be categorised and does not drift with current architectural trends. “He is like a pilot light”, as Imre Makovecz described him – not concerned with architectural fashions, but only with the specific place and cultural context, to which he seeks the one true, timeless answer. Although his works reveal recurring motifs, they are not defined by uniform stylistic elements but by the strength of unique ideas and concepts. “I can place myself in a single category,” he declares: “I am an architect who loves his country, who knows and respects our culture.”
His exemplary work in architecture, interior design and teaching, carried out with deep respect for the landscape and the values of the built environment, was recognised with the Kossuth Prize in 2006. István Ferencz is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) and a holder of the title Artist of the Nation. He was able to discover threads within the contradictory world of the former regime which, by circumventing and transcending that world, enabled him to weave architectural ideas of striking power. Architectural education, social engagement and design practice remain intertwined throughout his career. From the founding of the MMA until 2016, he led its Architecture Section. “It is essential that the educational framework be rooted in place, culture and homeland, for only in this way can wider horizons be crossed,” he reflected on the lessons of two decades spent at the University of Applied Arts. From the Miskolc Architectural Workshop, through the Óbuda Creative Community, to the Experimental Furniture Studio of the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, as head of the Department of Architecture and later of the MMA’s Architecture Section, he consistently sought and created opportunities for collective creation and action.
His creative credo is “the search for enduring value, to sustain a vibrant, pulsating life within it, and to leave a mark on the soil of the homeland.” István Ferencz took seriously the words of his master Antal Plesz: he became a responsible creator of distinctive character and a guiding personality. His architecture draws nourishment from the entirety of Hungarian culture – folk, modern and historical trends alike. Belonging to the forefront of both Hungarian and international practice, his architecture is unmistakably Hungarian and rooted in the Carpathian Basin, every element of it a masterpiece of the creative hand born to build.
[2017]