One of the most significant pieces in the oeuvre of Marcel Ferencz is the design of the Hun Baths, which achieved great success both in Hungary and abroad, being published and exhibited in several places. Behind this remarkable – in fact, debut-like – success stood a consistent design attitude, the defining elements of which can be traced just as much in the competition sheets for the tender of the National Theatre as in the pages of his DLA dissertation Intuitivity.
Both the plan of the theatre and the DLA thesis outline a special role for architectural drawing, whose status is extremely difficult to classify within traditional epistemological categories. It may be easier to determine Marcel Ferencz’s position in relation to drawing if we first try to uncover what drawing does not mean to him.
Following the work and ideas of Adolf Loos – and especially among architects wishing to perpetuate the traditions of modern architecture – it is a widespread view that architectural drawing lacks autonomy. The carrier of the idea is the house; the plan, the sketch, the drawing is merely a graphic fixation of the idea. Nothing more than a mere check: at most, information for the builder. In this interpretation, sketches leading to houses are only interesting insofar as they faithfully report the evolution of an idea, the full-fledged carrier of which can only be the HOUSE. If Marcel Ferencz could be placed in this group, we would know a series of drawings that faithfully follow the development of his architectural concepts. Instead, however, the photographs of his buildings are accompanied by images that carry transcendental references – imaginings in the strictest sense of the word.
In perfect contrast to this view stands the conception which, extending the boundaries of architecture as a genre, regards drawing as an equal medium to the house, in some cases independent of it, and fully autonomous. The belief that the unbuilt works of architectural history have come down to us in the form of beautiful tableaux also has historical precedents – the status-uncertainty of drawing is exemplified in architectural history (Piranesi’s engravings, Boullée’s or Ledoux’s visionary designs). An analysis of Marcel Ferencz’s oeuvre and works makes it clear that it would be problematic to classify him among those architects who claimed the autonomy and equality of drawing. If this were so, Marcel Ferencz would already have dedicated a website to his drawings, exhibited them, or collected them in an album.
For Marcel Ferencz, drawing is at once more important and less important: it is not merely the Neoplatonic mediator of the idea, nor its inheritor, nor merely a language, but rather an inner ladder. It is a rare and special state of existence that, through making, through the instinctive, sensual rhythm of lines, leads not only to the discovery of thoughts about architecture but also to the attainment of a special state of consciousness. In his case, drawing is not merely a tool for approaching the things of the world, but a link that anchors transcendent realms of knowledge to the everyday. The thesis diagram of his DLA dissertation on intuitivity is a model of the world, a living, momentary cross-section of the indeterminacy of soul, creativity, intuition, and vision. In his own interpretation of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s experience of flow: “when in the state of intuition we feel timelessness, it is a sign that we are in the world of our own-time, in the cross-section of the world which is our own self.”
For Ferencz, drawing is at once content and carrier, state and illustration, the beginning and the end of intuitivity: at once a medium of existence and the anthropological origin of thought – a being nourished by the body, born of the body, but no longer intelligible on the pages of a catalogue or the walls of an exhibition hall. These ideas, which in fact go back to Bruno Taut and the creative method of early 1920s expressionist architecture, and recall Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlungstheorie, place Marcel Ferencz’s architecture in the tradition of transcendental expressionism. A practice in which there are no formal canons, no principles of construction to counterbalance the possible wild flights of motifs. It is the genre of the solitary, inward-burning creator, whose only support is an unteachable, inherited taste. The hereditary taste postulated by István Janáky is another key concept for understanding Marcel Ferencz’s architecture, since the internal regulation that comes with it explains the flexibility and adaptability that led to the contextualist/regionalist buildings that appear as the formal leitmotif of his oeuvre. If we were to describe Marcel Ferencz’s architecture succinctly, we could define it as a kind of contextualist–regionalist attitude that complements the creative foundations of transcendental expressionism.
Accepting the above, the connection between the two key works – the Hun Fürdő (Hun Baths) and the Debrecen Centre of Building Energy – becomes clear, as does the coexistence of modernist cubes (Miskolc, Avas, extension of the ecclesiastical educational centre’s high school, 2009; mountain villa, 2012) and small-town archetypes (Bodrogkeresztúr, Bocskai Inn, 2005; Tokaj Hotel, 2014).
Key Works
2003. Hun Baths
Marcel Ferencz describes the site as follows:
“Between Tokaj and Bodrogkeresztúr there is a place called the LEBUJ (lit:”hiding”) bend. Here, returning carts from the fair were once ambushed and plundered by outlaws hiding in wait. Hence the name. This was the narrowest point of the highway between the Bodrog River and the foot of Mount Tokaj. It is a privileged place, for in the Bodrogzug it is here that the aszú ripens to its sweetest on the slopes above the houses. At the meeting of mountain and river the air becomes trapped, and the river fertilizes the vineyard. The landscape is gentle and wild at once. The Bodrog’s mysterious, sweetish, soft waters are at times poison green. This fertile terrain, interwoven with river, mountain, vineyard, highway, and legend, offered a site for the construction of a bathhouse. This mysterious natural image gave life to a creature of unusual architectural sizes.”
This “architectural creature” – part of a larger complex – was realized over nearly ten years as the result of a joint project with István Ferencz. According to István Ferencz’s concept, the building ensemble was to grow out of the stone-like retaining wall structures at the foot of the hill, thereby ensuring unity among the various functions. Later, following this concept, each building emerged from the nearly two-hundred-meter-long dry stone wall body formed along the hillside.
“Into this emerging stone-wall body,” Marcel Ferencz continues, “the missing final closing building – the bath – had to be placed among such ‘conditions.’ Three key principles shaped the course of the design. First, that the width of the building should conform in closed alignment with the neighbouring buildings; second, that the impact of the wall-like character should be strongly emphasized; and third, that the bath should receive a crown, a princely cap, in an ancient pattern.”
The crown motif by then was no longer entirely new in Ferencz’s oeuvre. It’s outlines can already be observed on the competition sheets for the National Theatre; it will also reappear in the form of a space-frame structure on the Debrecen Building Energy Laboratory, and from similar inspiration on the competition design for the Honvéd Főparancsnokság (Defense High Command) building on Szent György Square. It is a motif which, regardless of its shape, functions as a kind of axis mundi, propping up an axis towards the sky, thereby recalling Bruno Taut’s Glass Chain movement and the crown motif presented in his Alpine Architektur.
The Main Hall of the Hun Baths
The main space of the Hun Baths emerges on the façade. The massive, outward-slanting stone wall rises from the base plane; the windows illuminated from the cornice emit a dim, glowing light that evokes the atmosphere of cultic baths inside, while from the outside, in the dark, they shine forth like sculptures. The crown structure’s slanted carpentry had already been suggested in the plans, but its exact geometry was determined on site. The grey cattle horns were placed on the façade at the client’s request, exploiting the temple-like position offered by the crown. The motif further reinforces the archaic, cultic character of the house, while at the same time remaining clearly distinct from the iconography of the organic school.
The unusually shaped building required unusual construction:
“The 180 cm thick main façade wall consists of a 120 cm double-sized brick wall, fronted with Bodrogkeresztúr limestone cast into mortar. Because the limestone is not perfectly frost-resistant and has a loose, porous structure, it was applied in a thickness of 40–50 cm. Interestingly, the block stones were inserted into the masonry in a roughly hewn state, bound with mortar, and later, in a reversed technological procedure, were completely dressed flat with an axe after the mortar had set. The tufa-like stone is easily workable, and the marks of the axe blade remain visible on the stone surface. Because of the inclination of the stone wall and its northern orientation, it remains constantly damp and mossy. Absorbing rainfall, it becomes covered year after year with the noble mold characteristic of wine cellars, which changes color with the seasons – from yellow to poison green, from blue through rust-brown shades to anthracite.” The drawing comes into being in real time: Marcel Ferencz “pulls his lines” onto the building body, sketching its forms directly. This elemental architectural atavism is also confirmed by his concluding thoughts: “The building is the landscape-scale leading structure of a complex that works together with its environment. Its masonry, its proportions, the construction of its crown and its spatial section recall for the initiated eye the imagined, forgotten archetype of ancient Hungarians.” [Marcel Ferencz: HUNFÜRDŐ – Tokaj – Lebuj bend – Bathhouse. In: Magyar Építőipar(lit: Hungarian Construction Industry), Magyar Építőipar Kiadó, Budapest, 2009/6.]
The Wine Pavilion in Tokaj, built in 2006 – as the metonymic closing chord of the Hun Baths – likewise embodies and condenses the architectural idea of transcendental expressionism. The house, constructed of polished stone, is at once abstract and tectonic. It fits as much into the minimalist practice of the past decade as it aligns with the series of object-like houses. Its small scale serves as a precursor to the monumentality of the laboratory buildings in Debrecen; at the same time, the uniformity of its material use does not preclude the subtle formal gesture that, by vertically elevating the semicircular apse motif, creates a metaphorical link between the functions of cellar and chapel.
2010. CBA, Lóitató Square
Like the Hun Baths, the CBA (grocery store chain) Center at Lóitató (lit:horse watering) Square places itself within a historical–atavistic dimension. In Marcel Ferencz’s concise formulation, the square from which it takes its name “is today a memorial place, in fact a true resting point. Once, horse-drawn carriages climbing up Istenhegyi Road would stop here to water their horses. This site is a peculiar high point of Budapest, and at this elevation the sight to the Pest side already begins to reveal itself. The building stands on the circular-segment-shaped plot at the sloping corner of Lóitató Square. The road network, fixed by the sharp turns typical of hilly regions, was once traced by gradients negotiable for carts. The unusual contour of the plot recalled the ideal curve of cart-roads, so as a historical spatial wall it offered the task of an architectural concept, one that gave an unrepeatable justification for designing the building on a curve. The spatial body of the building rising at this turning point is therefore primarily a geometric necessity, and only secondarily a function. Thus the immense architectural gesture, with a radius of nearly 30 meters, by its very nature ordered and shaped both the program and the relation of architectural elements.”
The building is a constructed spatial model of the site’s former mode of use. It is at once memory and trace: its indexical link to the past generates its mass, which places into the service of commerce – a function at once sensitive and resistant to formal shaping – this emblematic representation.
In different words, but equally emphasizing the atavism of the gesture, Marcel Ferencz observes: “The silent sweep of the arc is a natural image, subordinating the formation of use beneath itself. The fabric of the area, accustomed to steep hillsides and climbs, is an atavistic force for the local inhabitants, one that had to permeate not only the spatial body of the building but also its spatial order and circulation system. The path chosen in architectural attitude sought to manifest itself beyond formal and material issues, as a tectonic element in the atmospheric sense of being-on-the-hill.”
[Ferencz Marcel: Ahol a lovak megálltak. In: epiteszforum.hu, June 18, 2010, http://epiteszforum.hu/ahol-a-lovak-megalltak]
2013–2015 – University Buildings in Debrecen
On the campus of the University of Debrecen, the DEM Sustainable Building Energy Information Center was completed in 2013. Though tiny in size, the building is monumental in effect. Through an internal, performed break of emotional–intellectual scale, it becomes a worthy counterpart to the architectural giants around it. The building’s unquestionable sacrality – expressed through the crown motif – is emphasized by the incorporation of the nine-part spatial scheme of Byzantine churches and by the presentation of the cube as a regular Platonic solid. The transcendental interpretive frameworks that fundamentally characterize Marcel Ferencz’s architecture are counterbalanced by highly logical, functionalist solutions. The building’s purpose is to present, measure, and evaluate mechanical and electrical systems. Its industrial character is underlined by the absence of suspended ceilings, allowing visitors to observe how a house can be realized using renewable energy sources. The efficiency of the systems within the building is continuously monitored and evaluated so that, in time, it may become possible to operate even a family house economically with these technologies. In the words of Zorán Vukoszávlyev, the house “does not explain itself through its form, but through its spirit and through its visible, tangible, understandable architectural solutions, and through its mechanical and electrical equipment.”
[Vukoszávlyev, Zorán: Léptékben lépték nélkül, In: Magyar Építőművészet, 2013/07, pp. 13–15]
For several years, despite its literally greatness in a strict sense, the tiny house crouched somewhat in solitude amidst its giant architectural siblings, until in 2015 Marcel Ferencz was given the opportunity to place the University of Debrecen’s supercomputer into a new small cube. Accepting the context he had himself created, Ferencz again set a Platonic cube quotation alongside the laboratory building. While the laboratory building is complemented by a crown quotation appearing as a space-frame, the Supercomputer building refers to the cube by means of a stage-wall that renders the printed circuit patterns of motherboards as plaster architecture. Together, the two buildings delineate a plausible direction for development. The rhythmically emerging future cubes will be able to carry within them the unity of diversity.
Installations
In 2009 – as a deepening of Marcel Ferencz’s theoretical and pedagogical research – he and Andor Wesselényi-Garay jointly formulated the concept of BorderLINE Architecture and a new pedagogical model of architectural education. First in writing, later in practice, they laid the foundations of a special community-based educational strategy. As an organic part of this pedagogical experiment, in the autumn of 2009 they entered the competition for the exhibition to be designed for the Hungarian Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia – and won. In 2010, under the title BorderLINE Architecture, they presented to an international public a unique concept that gave space for every Hungarian master architect and every architecture student to be represented. This exemplary and unprecedented idea was pioneering in Hungarian professional and educational circles. Two years later, the material for the 13th Biennale (Spacemaker) and for the 14th (Building) also grew out of this intellectual current, further exploring the theme initiated by BorderLINE through a focus on modelling and building, while retaining, in the same way as the 2010 concept, the intention of collective presentation.
Instead of presenting specific architectural works, Ferencz and Wesselényi-Garay aimed to reveal a cross-section of Hungarian architectural life which, alongside its characteristically Hungarian aspects, could also be aligned with certain aspects of international practice. In their proposed concept, the installation of the Hungarian Pavilion therefore identified not the House but the Line as the origin of architectural thought. With radical simplicity, they regarded the Line as the elementary unit of architecture, its generative material, whose drawing and discovery takes place in a space that is neither Hungarian nor international; neither lay nor professional; neither geographical nor utopian, but universal. The intellectual center of the exhibition was based on the (naturally subjective) conviction that the universality represented by the Line stands above the aforementioned opposites, and particularly above the Hungarian vs. international dichotomy. For this reason, what was planned for the Hungarian Pavilion was not an exhibition in the usual sense, but an installation built specifically for the site, which presented the primordial state of architecture, a kind of boundary condition. Not a traditional exhibition of drawings, but an interior that demonstrated, problematized, and built upon drawing as a process.
To confirm the exhibition’s central thesis – that architects still draw – some forty “drawing interviews” were recorded with twenty-two foreign and eighteen Hungarian architects. Some of the drawings captured on camera were illustrations of projects already built, some responded to the situation itself, and many could be interpreted as a graphic answer by the given creator to the question posed about drawing.
In designing the installation, they envisioned a space that simultaneously responded to the opposing processes of reduction and organization which characterize the representability of architectural works in exhibition contexts, and the transformation of drawings into architecture. They sought to evoke the space of paper while taking into account the spatial context of the Hungarian Pavilion. Thus the installation became a shared space, an evocation of the space of drawing. The sense of being cast into the space of paper was accentuated by an ethereal, tactile installation of thirty thousand suspended pencils in the pavilion interior.
Although it was an architectural exhibition, the creators sought to reach as wide an audience as possible. Their intention was to represent not only professionals but everyone who draws, regardless of age or gender. They found this symbol in the coloured and graphite pencils lying forgotten in drawers – worn down, chewed, long unused. The pencil remnants collected from Hungarian schools became one of the key elements of the exhibition.
A year later, the Biennale material was once again presented in an international context at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.
In the Autumn of 2009, while browsing architectural literature and databases, the expression “borderline architecture” could be found in essentially only one place: in the title of Aleksandr Burtsev’s study The “Borderline” Architecture of Russia (Архнтектон, 2009/04, No. 28). In Burtsev’s article, the turn of phrase “borderline” was used as the translation of the Russian word progranycnaja and referred to spontaneous or unintentional architecture in Russia. The text examined the sociological and characterological features of the “new folk” architecture that appeared in the first decades of the new millennium, shaped by the self-built construction of holiday homes and bungalows. The Russian historian’s study thus used the term “borderline” to position unintentional building within high architecture.
By the autumn of 2015, the phrase BorderLINE Architecture was returning thousands of search results in online databases, almost exclusively referring to the exhibition held in the Hungarian Pavilion of the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, between 29 August and 21 November 2010. Two bilingual books (in Hungarian and English), authored by Marcel Ferencz and Andor Wesselényi-Garay, were produced for the Biennale; for his two publications in these volumes, Marcel Ferencz received the “Publication of the Year” award from the University of Debrecen in 2011. The international success brought by the 12th Venice Biennale also had a clear impact in education. Ferencz was contacted by foreign partner institutions, and by international media and press. Numerous publications and lectures followed. The so-called Cutting Edge approach – a label attached to the creators by Alfred Jacoby, rector of the University of Weimar – defined the direction of further work.
Another outstanding example among Marcel Ferencz’s installations was the exhibition Névelő növények, Rajzoló szépírók (Plants as Articles, Drawing Writers), presented in several Hungarian museums and adapted to each venue. The concept was unique in several respects. Exhibitions of writers’ drawings had already been held before, usually based on the material of a single collection. By contrast, the museologists of the Déri Museum in Debrecen sought to survey the long tradition of Hungarian literature – from Mihály Csokonai Vitéz to Dezső Tandori – and to select works from various public collections holding literary archives. The exhibition presented the graphics, drawings, doodles, and photographs of forty-four Hungarian writers.
Plants as Articles became an example of the permeability between different artistic fields – literature, visual arts, and architecture – and of creating dialogue between the human senses. The exhibition space itself became a “book” of three hundred sheets, extending thirty meters in length, its pages cascading down. Each page, measuring 110 x 70 cm, was clipped onto two steel cables, and carried digital prints (graphic designer: Szabolcs Süli-Zakar) of drawings and photographs paired with selected quotations. The often miniature-sized drawings were thus re-contextualized in multiple ways by the graphic designer. Within the thirty-meter-long space, the book-body created new spaces, even shifting over time, as visitors “used” the artifact: they pulled the pages apart and, finding temporary refuge, hid among them.
There are countless metaphors about the relationship between architecture and literature, and even more – mostly architectural and spatial metaphors – that try to describe the space of the book. But in Marcel Ferencz’s installation, it was the book itself that became space, and with the noise of clips scratching the steel cables, it even acquired a voice.
The Plants as Articles, Drawing Writers exhibition can be regarded as a kind of spatial illustration, a graphic–literary experiment in space. Beyond its spatial use, the installation’s peculiarity lay in how it involved visitors in its own space – literally – without relying on the forced cult of interactivity. The gestures of giving and receiving were balanced: the visitor “made an effort” for the experience, while the necessarily one-sided message of traditional exhibitions, which is based on acceptance, was transformed into a dialogue between viewer and object. The initially evenly distributed forest of pages – like a book read and used – became deformed: thickenings and thinnings marked the larger openings of this book-space.
The exhibition was a single work of art. Not a series of graphics and quotations, but one whole: space, book – the space of the book. Following the installations in Venice and Novi Sad, the exhibition became another chapter in BorderLINE Architecture.
Education and Research
From 2006 – even before becoming head of department – Marcel Ferencz had already begun his research at the Department of Architecture, University of Debrecen. The first chapter of this work was entitled “The Future of Education is the Future of the City.” The student program, organized at the level of entire year groups, later became a tradition within the curriculum. Around this theme, a city exhibition and a vibrant professional life emerged. The work was presented to the profession at a Budapest exhibition (N&N Gallery).
Between 2007 and 2008, through student projects carried out within the research framework “Budapest 2020 – Margaret Island Olympic Park,” attention was drawn to how long-term national economic strategies could be considered in relation to several World Heritage sites. Their results were presented in Budapest, in the headquarters of the City Protection Association, in the presence of Mihály Ráday, through both an exhibition and a lecture. Later, in connection with this project, Marcel Ferencz was invited to become a member of the Together for Margaret Island Foundation.
The “Community Consultation” pedagogical model developed by Marcel Ferencz is closely related to the ideas of the 12th Venice Biennale, but in contrast to it, aimed at formulating a design methodology accessible to all, providing both experience and knowledge. Ferencz wrote a book on the method, the main goal of which was to define an educational philosophy for the ideal design studio.
The thesis of the book states that “studio consultations […] take place in full public view of the student community present in the studio. Consultant and student do not form pairs. Each consultation is conducted jointly by the lead instructor and the assistant instructors for every single student. […] In open consultations, the responses of the consultant are not given by redrawing or drawing into the student’s work, but verbally, or on a shared studio blackboard with chalk. The public blackboard consultation, where the consultant presents his insights in chalk before the student body, is complemented by the fact that the student may also sketch his or her ideas on the blackboard with chalk. The message takes shape in this shared dialogue on the blackboard, which the student then modifies in the design task for the following session. As a result, an open design-thinking process develops, accepted by all, where students and instructors without exception become acquainted with each other’s ideas and abilities.”
[Puhl, A. & Ferencz, M.: Studio: 2010–2011, University Notes, Ceze Publishing, Debrecen, n.d.]
The “Kopya” skyscraper research of the 2010 academic year was carried out using this new method. Its validity was confirmed by the fact that, at the time, international architectural trends had only rarely addressed the vision of layered skyscrapers organized into structurally distinct levels.
[Written in: 2016]