The architectural career of architect Ágnes Kravár merits examination not only in its own right but also from the perspective that she was the first woman academician to be admitted to the Architectural Section of the Magyar Művészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Academy of Arts). Architecture in Hungary remains a markedly male-dominated profession. Kravár made this evident in her inaugural lecture in a gentle, candid, distinctly feminine manner, not through sociological theory but by consistently foregrounding the ‘ancillary tasks’ associated with women’s roles alongside the presentation of her professional trajectory. In this way, the birth and upbringing of her children, the maintenance of family cohesion, and the care of ageing parents can be followed in parallel with her individual commissions. In recent decades, numerous studies have addressed the situation of women architects in Hungary – most notably the work of Mariann Simon – and this body of scholarship is further enriched by Ágnes Kravár’s career, the distinctive character of her architectural oeuvre, and the position she occupies within the Hungarian architectural milieu.
She was born in Sopron but spent only the first few years of her life there; the family subsequently moved back to Budapest. There were no architects among her forebears: her father was a creatively minded engineer, while her paternal grandfather was a highly sought-after master tailor. From them she may have inherited her receptiveness to formal articulation and to rational technical solutions. Her parents married in 1944, shortly before they were taken to Germany as engineering students of the Műegyetem (Budapest University of Technology), travelling on the same train as the architects later known as the ‘dániás’ group [a cohort of Hungarian architects and architecture students who, having spent time in Denmark and other Nordic countries during the final phase of the Second World War, later transmitted Scandinavian architectural influences into post-war Hungarian architecture].
Her outstanding draughtsmanship initially drew her towards fashion design, yet she ultimately chose architecture. Behind this decision lay the sense of awe she had experienced since childhood when confronted with Romanesque imperial cathedrals, hall churches, monumental masses and towers, and vast structures of perfect equilibrium. In 1965 she completed her secondary education at the Szilágyi Erzsébet Leánygimnázium (Szilágyi Erzsébet Girls’ Grammar School) in Budapest, and in the same autumn began her studies at the Faculty of Architecture of the Műegyetem. Among her teachers, Frigyes Pogány, Gyula Hajnóczi, József Pelikán and Tamás Meggyesi exerted a particularly strong influence on her intellectual and professional formation.
In 1970 she obtained her degree from the Department of Urban Planning, submitting as her diploma project the development plan for the spa town of Igal. In the professional context of the period, it followed almost naturally that after graduation she joined the Városépítési Tudományos és Tervező Intézet (VÁTI; Institute of Urban Planning and Design). By that time, the institute was engaged not only in settlement planning but also in architectural heritage conservation and professional research. Ágnes Kravár was fortunate in her placement: she was assigned to the ‘historic monuments’ unit headed by Tamás Dragonits, which allowed her to engage with far more than routine window layouts and, from time to time, to work in close proximity to the architecture of historical periods that had long fascinated her. In 1972 she married her fellow architecture student Tibor Tóth, and the couple began their independent life together.
In the early 1970s, most architects at the outset of their careers were rarely entrusted with more than the drawing of minor details, without any real opportunity for the complex world of architecture as a whole to unfold before them. Within the office, architect Ágnes Kravár worked under the direction of Tivadar Láng on the parapets of the slab blocks of the housing estate then under construction in Tatabánya; outside working hours, however, she was energetically designing a family holiday house intended for Tahitótfalu, which was realised in 1976. She conceived a simple, Scandinavian-inspired volume, closer in spirit to modernism than to Hungarian vernacular architecture, with two level-offset mono-pitched roofs, rendered brick walls, and robust columns clad in exposed stone. Everything is rational, everything is simple – yet the building is unmistakably protective and homely. There is as yet no trace of Kravár’s later undulating, curvilinear gestures or her more complex approach to massing; instead, the design is markedly more austere and functionally lucid, while nonetheless clearly expressing the receptive, intimate character of femininity.
In 1972 she received her first independent commission: the design of a sixteen-classroom primary school for the Tatabánya–Dózsakert housing estate, complete with a teaching swimming pool, gymnasium, and catering facilities. In 1974, four years after obtaining her degree, her first independent building was realised. As with her own holiday house, the influence of Scandinavian modernism is clearly perceptible: brick cladding, a recessed, stepped façade, and timber coffered suspended ceilings counterbalanced the surrounding prefabricated housing blocks. The large expanses of glazing and the broad school corridors flooded with light beneath the coffered ceilings created a serene, spatially tangible sense of openness for the children of the industrial city.
The year 1972 marked a turning point in her career. It was then that architect Imre Makovecz joined the VÁTI and set up his studio in the room adjacent to that shared by Kravár and her colleagues. Already regarded within the profession as a ‘maverick’, Makovecz’s charismatic personality, professional brilliance, and the atmosphere that prevailed in his workshop proved deeply compelling for the young architect; it was, as she later recalled in writing, as though they worked day and night.[1] Before long, Ágnes Kravár was herself working within this fervent creative circle.
The ethos of architect Imre Makovecz and the studio culture that formed around him stood in stark contradiction to everything Ágnes Kravár had encountered in architectural practice up to that point – and, more broadly, to much of what characterised Hungary in the 1970s. An unshakeable faith in creation, a conviction about architecture’s persuasive power, and a freedom of form in place of grid-bound thinking were fundamental to their approach; so, too, were an openness to the world’s genuine values and a turn towards the discovery of rural culture. It was within this milieu that Kravár became an architect in the full creative sense of the term. For a long period she participated in the studio’s work primarily as an editor – during these years her first child was born – and in 1978 Makovecz entrusted her with the design of the Cserhát restaurant near Pásztó. Set on a hill, the building also functions as a viewing point, commanding fine panoramas of the Cserhát and Mátra ranges. The siting shaped the architectural concept: the deliberate duality of a fully enclosed ground floor and an open upper level. On the road-facing front tract, the wine bar is encircled by a reinforced-concrete wall ring that creates a small enclosed garden court. Upstairs, the restaurant interior is dominated by the exposed timber roof structure, carried at its centre by a reinforced-concrete column; from the dining room and from the surrounding cantilevered terrace, a full 360-degree view opens out. The roof is covered in timber shingles, and the doors and windows are bespoke timber constructions. The building is unmistakably Makoveczian in spirit; yet the roofline, fractured by chimneys, and the massing – poised with elegant assurance between symmetry and asymmetry – articulate a voice of its own. The interior fit-out was designed by interior architect Gábor Mezei, who by then was already a regular collaborator of the Makovecz studio.
In the same period, working on commission for VÁTI, Kravár was involved in the preparation of reconstruction plans for the Széchenyi Palace in Sopron, while in parallel she undertook the design of family houses as an independent practitioner. In 1980, a further major shift occurred in her professional life: Imre Makovecz left VÁTI to take up the position of chief architect of the Pilis Forestry Company, and Ágnes Kravár gave birth to her second child – who has since become an architect and is today her mother’s creative partner.
Her next major commission, undertaken between 1981 and 1983, was the design of the István Király Szálló (King Stephen Hotel) in Pécsvárad. “It was with this building that I first experienced the exquisite pleasure of creation”, the architect later recalled.[2] The setting of the abbey founded by Prince Géza and subsequently developed during the reign of King Stephen imposed numerous constraints on the design, above all the requirement that the extension to the existing single-storey Baroque building with vaulted cellars, as well as to the shingle-roofed, domed tower projecting from the castle wall, had to remain entirely concealed behind the line of the fortifications. The entrance is inserted as a narrow infill between the new hotel wing and the historic structure. Kravár resolved this situation through an anthropomorphic approach to form and by subtly breaking the plane of the entrance façade. The centrally angled block, built of unrendered brick, mediates between the old building and the new, two-storey hotel wing with its rendered façade. In front of the L-shaped complex stand the ruins of the Benedictine abbey dating from the time of King Stephen; Kravár’s intervention neither disrupts this atmosphere nor resorts to archaic imitation, but instead brings the two into dialogue through a gesture of attentive observation and contemplation. The projecting upper storey of the hotel wing, the rubble-stone plinth, and the dimensions and proportions of the openings that echo the windows of the historic building are all details that evoke the site’s historical character while remaining firmly rooted in their own time.
Her next major project, undertaken in the second half of the 1980s, was the Domonkos-udvar (Dominican Court), a large residential complex designed for an expansive site of almost one hectare outside the Várkerület (Castle District) in Sopron. During this period, Ágnes Kravár was once again working alongside architect Imre Makovecz: in 1985 she left VÁTI and joined the Makona Tervező Kisszövetkezet (Makona Design Cooperative), which had been founded two years earlier by Makovecz together with Zoltán Koppány and Ervin Nagy. At the office on Lánchíd Street, an ever-growing number of young architects began to appear, while the Visegrád camps launched in 1981 acted as a powerful magnet for talents eager to break free from routine and hungry for what they regarded as genuine architecture. Imre Makovecz’s reputation and influence continued to grow, and around this time he was joined, among others, by Attila Turi, Lőrinc Csernyus, László Zsigmond, Ágnes Zsigmond, Ferenc Salamin, Tibor Bata, Dezső Ekler, Tamás Nagy, and László Vincze. Around Makovecz there thus emerged the Hungarian school of organic architecture, a movement that remains active to this day.
It was within this busy, intellectually charged milieu that Kravár received the new commission. The Sopron housing scheme represented a substantial challenge, both in scale and in its urban context; yet for Ágnes Kravár it also proved familiar ground, as a native of Sopron and as an architect who had worked on the reconstruction plans for the nearby Széchenyi Palace. She divided the complex – L-shaped in plan, with a wing turning obliquely into the courtyard – into two parts, creating some forty flats across two storeys. Along the street frontage she articulated the composition as two central and two end blocks. Their façades share a common language but differ slightly in their detailing, enabling the large volume to be tuned to the late Baroque and eclectic character of the streetscape. The ridge line of the two central units rises a little above that of the flanking blocks. The arched treatment of the façade openings lends the building a timeless air, recalling the dense, tightly abutting houses of Sopron’s historic centre. Symmetry around the arches is subtly unsettled by small variations from façade to façade. On the courtyard side, the white-rendered elevation is broken by deep, loggia-like access galleries: on the lower level by arcades, and above by columns set on an arched cornice, with substantial parapets and an impressively expressed timber roof structure. Taller, projecting volumes beside the stairwells further articulate the composition. The result is an ensemble that, drawing on the formal vocabulary of Sopron’s medieval town-centre dwellings, executes a bold shift of scale and employs asymmetry with restraint to produce an architecture that is calm, strongly characterised, and unmistakably contemporary. Construction coincided with the regime change, when Sopron was transformed from a border town into the first major stop for westbound and inbound traffic. As a consequence, the street-level flats had to be converted into retail units, and in several places the duplex upper-floor apartments envisaged in the original design had to be reconfigured as single-storey dwellings. Completed in 1992, the building has stood the test of time: its historicising atmosphere and its sense of freshness have lost nothing of their credibility.
The second half of the 1980s brought a period of remarkable success at Makona. These were the years in which architect Imre Makovecz’s churches in Siófok and Paks were realised. In the case of the latter, the detailed construction design of the glass roof crowning the curved timber supports and articulating the church’s fundamental form was prepared by Ágnes Kravár on the basis of Makovecz’s sketches. She has recalled this commission as one of the most demanding undertakings of her professional career.
In 1987 architect Imre Makovecz presented his work at several exhibitions in Germany, and in the final, transformative phase of the bipolar world Europe suddenly turned its attention to Hungarian organic architecture. An exchange programme was launched with the studio of the Danish architect Erik Asmussen, based in Järna, Sweden: Swedish architects could work in Budapest, while Hungarian architects travelled to Järna. Ágnes Kravár was the ‘first swallow’ of this initiative; in 1988 she spent three months working in Asmussen’s office. Engaged within an international team and immersing herself in the Steinerian philosophy that underpins Asmussen’s architecture, she formed numerous professional relationships and friendships that would last a lifetime. As she later put it in her own words: “…I knew that this was the end of my youth.”
International attention reached a further peak in 1991, when the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale presented the work of Imre Makovecz and of Hungarian organic architects. For Ágnes Kravár, the shared appearance in Venice confirmed that the international architectural scene was receptive to the work of Hungarian designers, and that the mode of architectural thinking of which her own career formed an integral part was capable of offering meaningful responses to the questions of the contemporary world.
In 1991 the moment came for professional independence: Ágnes Kravár left Makona and, together with Anikó Szentesi, founded the Paralel Építésziroda (Paralel Architects), within whose framework she continues to work to this day. Among the major projects realised by the practice, particular mention must be made of three buildings in Budapest completed in the early 2000s: the Hotel Sissi in Ferencváros, the residential building on Angyal Street, and the Nursing Home for the Elderly on Rupp Hill.
The Hotel Sissi was realised as part of the Ferencváros rehabilitation programme. In the immediate vicinity of the site stands the Corvin Hotel, a building of strong, assertive character designed by architect Sándor Dévényi. Kravár offered a consciously ‘feminine’ response to Dévényi’s hard, bastion-like, ‘masculine’ architecture. The street façade of Hotel Sissi undulates gently, its volume swelling progressively from storey to storey as it descends, while the planar surfaces articulated by courses of brick bite ever more deeply into the parapets of the balconies, forming a playful counterpoint to Dévényi’s building. At the same time, the design evokes the cheerfulness and French-inflected elegance of eclectic Budapest. The robust projecting risalit above the entrance canopy recalls, in a non-figurative and purely architectural idiom, the atlas figures of Pest’s late nineteenth-century apartment palaces. A decade and a half later, in 2015, Ágnes Kravár received a new commission together with her son, architect Márton Tóth, to link the two buildings and to add a conference facility. This offered an opportunity for a reflective return to the original concept and for a rearticulation of the relationship between the two structures.
Three years after the completion of Hotel Sissi, in 2002, a six-storey residential and office building with an added attic level was realised directly opposite the hotel to designs by Ágnes Kravár. Here, for the first time in her career, we encounter a pronounced and deliberate use of colour on the façade. The building slips with ease into the streetscape – the greyish stone cladding of the lower two storeys gives way above to a rendered elevation – yet around the ground-floor openings, and across the surfaces and fenestration pattern of the enclosed balcony on the upper level, a strong deep-blue tone appears. It returns as a tile-like decorative accent between the window bays on the upper storeys and, on the rear elevation, on the balcony railings. Characteristic of Art Nouveau, this hue introduces cheerfulness and energy, along with a faint historical resonance, into the overall image of the building – and of the entire stretch of street.
In the same period, Ágnes Kravár designed the Rupp Hill Home for the Elderly in Budapest’s District XI by reshaping the anonymous, box-like building of a former workers’ hostel. Transforming a structure originally intended to accommodate 116 residents into a friendly, intimate, genuinely homely environment was no straightforward task. Kravár undertook a thorough reconfiguration of both the four-storey and the two-storey wings. While the street-facing massing was left essentially unchanged, the opposite side was extended with a new wing. On the footprint of the lower block’s former roof, she created an inviting roof terrace with a glazed veranda, outdoor seating, and a pergola. Between the lower, two-storey volume and the taller, four-storey wing, Kravár inserted, beside the entrance, a small tower element that breaks the composition. Its timber structure, reminiscent of a bell cote, incorporates a fine viewing terrace tucked beneath the roof. Below the tower sits the chapel’s semi-circular apse, built in unrendered brick and pierced by an arched stained-glass window. It is perhaps in this project that Kravár most openly adopts Makovecz’s architectural idiom: the half-pilasters rising along the façade’s central axis and flaring into funnel-like forms at the top, the bundled timber members projecting from them, and the irregularly broken line of wall behind the chapel apse are all unmistakably Makoveczian motifs. At the same time, the timber-built terrace balustrades, the paired semi-circular arches, and the chapel’s cave-like interior – opening through rounded arches – also recall the medievalising atmosphere of the Domonkos-udvar in Sopron.
The lessons of the Dominican Court in Sopron can also be traced in Kravár’s design for a residential building in Piliscsaba in the mid-2000s. The forty-eight-flat complex stands near Pázmány Péter Catholic University, on the bank of a stream. The broken line of its façade follows the course of the water, while three wings articulated by arched openings, with lower rendered sections inserted between them, bring the large overall mass down to a more approachable scale. As in Sopron, the building presents different faces towards the street and towards the natural landscape: on the outward side, compact, weighty volumes alternate with exposed brick surfaces and white-painted rendered façades, while on the rear elevation a composition in white and terracotta is opened up by arcades at ground level and by column-supported balconies above. Organised according to function, the duality of enclosure and openness is resolved into a coherent architectural whole.
In the early 2010s, a project took shape on Ágnes Kravár’s drawing board that in many respects stands apart within her oeuvre. Alongside her larger commissions, she had continued to design family houses, and at this point she turned to a multi-unit residential building in Budapest’s District XI. Its immediate neighbour was an anonymous, flat-roofed apartment block from the 1970s, to which the new building had to attach in a semi-detached configuration. In this situation there was no scope for the curves and undulating gestures characteristic of Kravár’s architecture, and the scale of the building rendered any subdivision of the mass into units of varying cornice height impractical. She instead relieved the rigidity of the façade by extending the reinforced-concrete side piers of the upper-floor terraces upward, allowing them to interlace in a continuous ring that functions as a pergola for the roof-level terrace. The same pergola structure is repeated at ground level on the corner of the building. Through this emphatic articulation of the balconies, the house acquires a sense of lightness and airiness, while the side elevation is able to adopt a gabled, pitched-roof form. Timber appears here solely in the frames of the openings, a further exception within the oeuvre. The building’s simple, clear geometry yields a harmonious composition, signalling that Ágnes Kravár’s architecture is not confined to the idiom of the organic school but is that of an independent, singular thinker capable of offering a valid architectural response to each specific situation.
The two most recent milestones in Kravár’s career are again connected to Imre Makovecz. In 2011 Makovecz was commissioned by the Óbuda municipality to design a kindergarten and a nursery on two adjoining plots in a quiet street in Csillaghegy, yet his death in September of that same year prevented him from completing the work. The project was taken over by Ágnes Kravár and Diána Mike, who at the time was working with Makona as a roaming associate. The building completed in 2014 – the so-called Makovecz nursery – took as its point of reference Makovecz’s last public building both designed and realised by him, the kindergarten in Makó. Kravár and her colleague carried forward the master’s spirit, and the Csillaghegy building thus became a worthy counterpart to the Makó composition: it begins with a broad covered forecourt and is organised around domed group rooms. The village-like porches in front of the rooms, the circular-plan domed units ranged in a gentle curve, and the internal play courtyard enclosed by them create a sheltered, harmonious world for small children. The columns that support the deeply lowered eaves line, and the carved timber beams that rise at the centre of the semicircular windows, read like elements of a fairytale cottage, while above them hexagonal roof-light structures sit like hats. The building radiates protection, security, and an unfettered freedom of imagination; this is framed, in a soft, sheltering gesture, by timber-panelled glazed doors at ground level. Within the group rooms, the exposed rib arches of the domes dominate the spatial experience, their convergence evoking a stylised image of a mother’s lap. Ceramic reliefs set within the interior and in the ‘gable’ zones above the ground-floor windows introduce the deep blue previously seen in Kravár’s Angyal Street residential and office building, harmonising beautifully with the walnut-brown stained timber surfaces. This is not a building that follows Kravár’s own architectural principles, nor does it seek to align itself closely with the visual language of its immediate surroundings; rather, it stands as an expression of respect and gratitude towards the Master – an attitude that has permeated her entire professional life.
The most recent major work within the oeuvre is likewise connected to the Master: in 2021 the comprehensive reconstruction of Imre Makovecz’s Roman Catholic church in Siófok was completed, under the direction of Ágnes Kravár.
If one were to distil the defining qualities of Ágnes Kravár’s architecture, it would be the shaping of architectural mass and the harmony conveyed through impeccably handled proportions that most readily come to the fore. Hers is undeniably a ‘feminine’ architecture: at once emotional and rational, one that creates order in the world through simple means, avoids strident stylistic gestures, fulfils functional requirements with precision, and gives rise to spaces of intimate inhabitation. Through her work, one may glimpse the rarely visible feminine dimension of Hungarian organic architecture.
[1] Ágnes Kravár, “Makovecz-közelképek 1972-től a közelmúltig (lit. Makovecz Close-Ups from 1972 to the Recent Past).” Országépítő, 2012/3, p. 17.
[2] Ibid., p. 19.
[Written in 2022]