“Zoltán Gulyás was one of the most gifted members of the generation of architects who began their careers after 1956” – thus opens the 2005 monograph on the architect by architectural historian András Ferkai. Gulyás’s architecture achieved a distinctly European standard at a time when Hungarian building practice was generally dominated by hastily erected, uniform and often poor-quality constructions, constrained by prefabricated technologies and by a certain conceptual narrowness both in formal articulation and in the choice of materials. Within this environment he sought to assert his innate maximalism, a design attitude striving for uncompromising quality. In his work, Scandinavian modernism, the English brick-building tradition and the monumental forms of Louis Kahn converged with the practical demands of the period. His refined sense of form, aesthetic sensibility oriented towards harmony and his deliberate, thoughtful use of materials made him a singular presence on Hungary’s architectural scene during the 1960s and 1970s. He brought his oeuvre to an early close, his last major realised work being the school building in Révfülöp completed in 1981.
At the beginning of the 1950s, as a young architect working in the studio of István Janáky at KÖZTI (Középülettervező Iroda – lit. Public Building Design Office), he participated in the two largest commissions of the time: the reconstruction of Buda Castle and the planning of the University of Miskolc. He thus found himself at the centre of the key processes that shaped the emergence of the specifically Hungarian form of Socialist Realism. He was able to learn from the older masters while also encountering the Scandinavian experiences of the so-called ‘dániások’ (György Jánossy, Zoltán Farkasdy, Lajos Zalaváry [Hungarian architects who had studied in Denmark]), who drew extensively on the rational, tradition-conscious yet modernist models of Northern European architecture. Shortly afterwards he joined a Hungarian team of architects involved in the post-Korean War reconstruction: he travelled to Pyongyang, where a university building was realised according to his plans, and he also prepared the design documentation for a scientific institute, though no realisation is known in that case.
His professional development continued from 1954 at the MÉSZ Mesteriskola (Master School of the Association of Hungarian Architects), where his first master was Pál Németh, who emigrated in 1956; Gulyás then continued his studies under the guidance of Jenő Szendrői. In 1956 he followed his master and became a designer at IPARTERV (Ipari Épülettervező Vállalat – Industrial Building Design Company), remaining there until 1986 with one brief interruption: in 1964 he was selected for the exchange programme initiated by Ernő Goldfinger [Hungarian-born British modernist architect], which each year offered several young Hungarian architects the opportunity to work in England. Gulyás worked in the Architectural Department of the London County Council until 1965.
By the latter half of the 1950s he was already attracting attention in architectural competitions through his distinctive solutions. The nursery designed for Várpalota in 1956, with its strip-like structural organisation, generous massing, large glazed elevations and rubbed-plaster façades, strikingly anticipates the modernism of the 1960s, while its rubble-stone plinth ensures that it settles harmoniously into the townscape. His first realised work in Hungary, the block of OTP Bank-owned apartments on Fehérvári Road in District 11 of Budapest, completed in 1960, won such immediate and unequivocal acclaim that in 1962, at the age of only thirty-two, he was awarded the Ybl Prize [major Hungarian state award for architecture]. The seven-storey corner building contains fifty flats, with hospitality and community facilities and administrative offices on the ground floor. Its strip-window system, brown clinker-brick cladding, recessed glazed stairwell tract and the roof shell projecting above the top storey form a balanced and expressive composition.
The following year saw the completion of the residential block in Madách Street, Budapest, which, while aligning itself with the monumental ensemble created in the 1930s, nonetheless conveys lightness and cheerfulness. The variations articulated in each wing are unified by the horizontally banded brick façade, structured by identical window strips, and the outwardly balanced masses become richer in detail as they turn inward towards the core of the block. Taken together, both residential buildings are articulated yet coherent, calm yet airy; their principal compositional elements are rhythm, carefully designed plans and the legibility of internal structuring on the exterior. They are permeated by both modernism and respect for architectural tradition, and in this way became defining architectural features of the Budapest that was being reshaped in the 1960s; in neither aesthetic nor functional terms have they since become outdated.
The early 1960s marked the peak of Gulyás’s architectural career. Completed in 1963, the Chemolimpex–OTP office building in Deák Ferenc Street in central Budapest represented a milestone in several respects: located at a prominent point of the city, close to Vörösmarty Square, housing OTP offices on the ground floor and the headquarters of a foreign-trade company on its upper levels, the building stood as a symbol of the decade’s economic upswing and of the Hungarian reality tentatively opening towards a market economy. In architectural terms, Gulyás’s design raised it to a genuinely European standard. A courtyard of a rented tenement building adjoins the U-shaped block at the rear. Above the two-storey low-rise section containing the OTP branch rise two seven-storey wings, reaching, indeed slightly surpassing, the cornice height of the neighbouring buildings. Within the U a contained but uncovered urban courtyard is formed, expanding the cramped space of the inner-city street while nonetheless creating a more intimate environment. Beneath the first-floor low-rise structure, the recessed glazed ground-floor façade offers airy, light-filled interiors while presenting a clean and straightforward expression to the street. Higher up, the black mullions impose order and rhythm, and the varied positions of the tilt-and-turn windows give the façade a lively appearance. The original grey-granite cladding (replaced with red granite during the 1988 renovation) possessed a dignified yet unostentatious presence, harmonising with the surrounding colour palette while still distinguishing the building within its context. As architectural historian Mihály Kubinszky notes, Gulyás used the leftover materials and waste from the construction of the Erzsébet Bridge with particular care and economical sense for the cladding of the office building. The calm, solid yet dynamic overall effect achieved through his composition, materials and interplay of open and closed spaces expressed the very essence of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation of technological progress, the harmony derived from classical modernism, the dynamism of the city and a respect for proportion. The design of the bank interior demonstrates the same virtues, with its illuminated beam-grid ceiling, its two-storey internal space and the use of high-quality finishing materials. Contemporary assessments linked the design to Alvar Aalto’s influence, a connection also discernible in Gulyás’s earlier residential buildings, yet they emphasised that the result is far from derivative; rather, it is a work of mature architectural thinking, fully at home within the world standards of modern architecture.
Another highly significant office building is the Medicor headquarters in Angyalföld, Budapest, completed in 1967 for the medical-instrument manufacturer. It was connected to the main factory block and housed administrative and clerical functions, a 720-person staff changing facility and a kitchen and restaurant capable of serving 1,000 meals. This was the first office building in Hungary with fixed, non-opening windows and full air-conditioning throughout its interior volume. The reinforced-concrete frame of the main building, cantilevered in sections, is enclosed by an aluminium curtain-wall façade with plastic ventilation grilles. Gulyás counterbalanced its high-tech character through the finely proportioned subdivision of the façade: instead of the customary upright rectangular windows, he introduced a curtain wall composed of almost square, horizontally ordered units, softening and enlivening the otherwise uniform plane. The delicately modelled ventilation apertures possess an almost sculptural quality. From street level, an elegant, broad flight of steps leads up to the twin main entrances.
Alongside his large-scale buildings, Gulyás’s clarity of composition and meticulous attention to detail are equally visible in several projects of smaller scale. The Rózsakert bistro–espresso bar in Hévíz, constructed in the late 1960s during the heyday of Lake Balaton tourism (a period not yet marked by the later waves of destructive overdevelopment), achieved a graceful synthesis of modernist principles and the traditional small-town atmosphere of Hévíz. The differing modes of use of the ground-floor bistro and the upper-level espresso bar (the former frequented mainly during the day, the latter in the evening) coexist without disturbance. At the centre of the rigid, angular volumes, a circular opening creates an intimate interior naturally illuminated from above. The upper-storey façade facing the lake, articulated with vertical louvres, is simultaneously open and closed in effect, integrating the external view into the autonomous nocturnal life of the entertainment venue. The bistro also includes two enclosed, atrium-like courtyards; the floors supporting the upper storey rest on the reinforced-concrete walls surrounding these spaces.
In Budapest, the Buda Castle Quarter is perhaps the most demanding setting for contemporary architectural intervention. In 1974 Gulyás completed a residential building in Tárnok Street on an infill site created by wartime destruction, situated directly beside the Matthias Church. As the final element in a continuous historic streetscape, the two-storey, attic-storey, gable-roofed house presents a plastically modelled mass, with artificial-stone and ceramic inlays on its cladding. On the garden-facing elevation, loggias articulate the façade, while above them the stairwell’s copper-clad skylight rises prominently. As part of the garden, several surviving wall fragments of the medieval house previously on the site were retained.
Alongside his realised buildings, a number of unbuilt designs and competition entries produced at Gulyás’s drawing board will undoubtedly be regarded as significant milestones by future Hungarian architectural historiography. Among these is his 1963 proposal for the main pavilion of the Budapest International Fair, which won first prize. His concept raises the pavilion above its surroundings by encircling it with an earth embankment; at its centre lies a sports field with stands, around which the exhibition hall is organised. The entire complex is sheltered beneath a boldly conceived shell structure.
Generosity of form, exacting standards and precision: these were the defining qualities of Gulyás’s architecture, qualities that stood at considerable remove from mainstream Hungarian building practice in the 1960s and 1970s. To sum up his oeuvre, the words of Mihály Kubinszky may be quoted:
“He was an architect of order and meticulous care. He succeeded in overcoming the material and structural constraints of difficult years. For this reason he became one of the most accomplished Hungarian architects of his era, especially of the 1960s and 1970s. His works reflect that challenging period with the greatest fidelity, a period to which we lend barely any attention today. Yet whatever in those years proved good and enduringly valuable will most readily be found by future generations in the oeuvre of Zoltán Gulyás, and they will indeed find it there.”
[Written: 2017]