Péter Pásztor is the embodiment of the Central European man. He is a Hungarian born in Slovakia. His wife is Slovak. He works and lives in Košice. He teaches in Poland and Hungary. He speaks Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, and German. He comes from a middle-class family. Péter Pásztor is an architect, a Central European architect. His thinking is shaped by the centuries-old heritage of the Highland bourgeoisie of Košice and Gelnica.
His first jobs were in state planning companies. His background and upbringing prevented him from fitting into that atmosphere. Nor did he feel a sense of architectural ownership of the design work that was being done. In 1989, he spent eight months in Budapest working in Imre Makovecz’s design office. The time he spent there laid the foundations for his later creative work. The young generation of architects that gathered around Imre Makovecz (Lőrinc Csernyus, Ferenc Salamin, Attila Turi, László Zsigmond, Gábor Tamás) has maintained close ties with all members of the generation to this day. The architectural trends that he learned here are still the driving force behind his actions and work. He believes that architecture is first and foremost a service. He combines this spiritual heritage with organic thinking in his architecture. Spending nearly a year with Imre Makovecz and starting a private practice at home was the first real test of his career.
Back in Košice, he founded his own architectural practice with Martin Drahosky in 1990. The organic approach that he had learned in Budapest became a fundamental principle in his private practice. He believes that if architecture is truly art, and indeed the mother of all arts, its product cannot be a pearl in a pigsty – corn is more appropriate – because true art is not ostentatious, on the contrary, it is modest; it is based on honesty and depth of relationships. It is not good to be born only for oneself. He understands the need for a certain globalisation of the world and the unconditional accession to Europe, the rejection of which would plunge us back into antiquity – but he rejects the idea of mindless Americanisation, for example because he knows very well what a trip to the castle of Spiš or to Levoča means to an average American! Because to join Europe as a cosmopolitan, without an appreciation of one’s own values, is the beginning of the extinction of nationalism. On the other hand, to join Europe as a nationalist is absolutely ridiculous, because this category lost its raison d’être a long time ago. But to join Europe with the knowledge that I have brought something back to the community, that is the real happiness for everyone! The fact that people tend to perceive organic architecture as an architectural style rather than a general principle is a tragedy of architecture, and ultimately of our own environment. For Peter Pásztor, architecture is first and foremost about life and its relationship to values.
“That’s why I want my houses to be homely, so that you just feel comfortable, and it’s not important that everyone knows that. For me, every house is a church – or because I have learned nothing in life better than architecture, it is the only original way to proclaim the glory of God!”
At the heart of his architectural career is the design of buildings, spaces and gathering places for small communities and municipalities. He has worked and continues to work in a kind of strange, inner Central European periphery, where buildings define the image of municipalities, giving direction to a system of municipal architecture that does not officially exist.
The concrete form of the building is of secondary importance to the architect. For Peter Pásztor, it is natural that the building has a very rational urbanistic, plan, structural and spatial conceptual solution – evidence without which one should not talk about architecture. To reduce architecture to architectural technique, as has been done in the construction of housing estates in all the cities of Slovakia, is equally unproductive. Unfortunately, this narrow-minded approach has become deeply ingrained in entire generations, and even more tragically, it is still present in university education today – which he considers extremely dangerous.
“I feel that it is high time to reflect on whether we architects are doing the right thing; whether we have not allowed ourselves to be seduced into a path where we want to remake nature in our own image, forgetting that we cannot defeat or transform nature and our environment, we can only coexist with them – with humility and respect!”
“It is as if we were afraid (and architects are not to be left out of this at all) to think further and to develop ideas. One idea gives birth to another and it is true that those who are not aware of values are very easily disoriented. Of course, this often leads to a failure to think further. But such thinking can easily be the undoing of this country! Just like the opposite – the senseless import of all sorts of new cosmopolitan influences without enough confrontation with what is or was already there.”
Peter Pásztor has made an unparalleled contribution to the emergence of organic architecture in Central Europe, and especially in Slovakia. One important milestone in this process is the exhibition of organic-inspired works by Slovak architects entitled Living Architecture 2000 in Budapest (the exhibition of works by 39 architects was organised in cooperation between the Slovak Architects Association and the Magyar Kulturális Intézet (Hungarian Cultural Institute)) and the exhibition of the architectural activities of the Kós Károly Egyesülés (Kós Károly Association), which opened in parallel at the East Slovak Gallery in Kassa. At the initiative of Péter Pásztor, the exhibiting architects also took part in a design competition for the unfinished tower of St. Elisabeth’s Cathedral in Košice.
The duplex house in Bakonszeg still bears the Makovec style features. It does this in a way that you don’t get a sense of imitation when you look at the building. The Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Sorrows, the patron saint of Slovakia, in Lovinobaňa, already bears the architectural elements that characterise the whole of Péter Pásztor’s work: sacral space, simple plan, unique use of windows. Light has always been important to him – he uses light as a practically floating structure in his buildings. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer architects today are employing co-artists to design their houses – Péter Pásztor is not one of them. The copper plate relief of Christ in the church is a good example of this.
The church in Lónyabánya is Péter Pásztor’s most successful work. The composition is based on straight lines breaking towards a point of orientation, towards a point that is already outside the building. The simple three-legged belfry stands at this point. This is the architect’s testimony to his work:
“In creating it, I drew from the world of miners so close to me, for whom the afterlife is often the mysterious world of the earth’s interior. It seems to me that they were also looking for the sky in the mysterious depths of the earth. The entrance to the church is in fact a mine entrance, behind which the visitor is presented with a surprisingly spacious underground room with a perspective that reaches out towards a point of reference; its walls and roof meet at a point – somewhere in infinity, outside space – symbolising our life, which does not end with our earthly career, but which reaches out towards God.”
In another work, during the renovation, he placed Imre Schrammel’s relief entitled Kassai Polgárok (Citizens of Kassa) on the façade of the Márai Studio Stage of the Thália Theatre in Košice (with the help of Imre Makovecz and the MMA social organisation). The plans of the Otčina Insurance Company in Košice and the completed building reveal a Mediterranean influence.
The detailing of the Pásztor buildings echoes the playfulness of Sándor Dévényi’s facades. In his building plan for the 7th Venice Architecture Biennale, he experimented with a new kind of organic fabric, the origins of which can be traced back to the expressive architecture of the 1930s, which had been undeservedly neglected. Imre Makovecz made the layout of the Vigadó in Szigetvár more futuristic and expressive. The two towers are already a foretaste of the Church of Divine Mercy in Košice. The “monolithic” massing is perfectly complemented by the single façade material: metal. The internal mapping is the twin of that in Lovinobaňa.
It’s a shame that only the church was built from the building plan – few people know that the church was one of the most important elements of a larger plan, but it doesn't look unfinished, so the visitor doesn’t feel the absence.
Peter Pásztor’s sacred spaces include the plan for the Reformed Church in Košice. The floating roof, which reaches towards the sky, complies with the laws of tectonics and weightlessness. His most recent works in Kassa are in the spirit of a narrow genius loci. The EKF 2013 – SPOT – Cultural Centre, the downtown passage design and the Technical University – Exhibition Hall (former distillery) all speak to the spirit of place. The monograph and exhibition of Oelschäger-Őry, co-authored with Adriana Priatkova, was one of the major events of the ECOC 2013.
“As much as I look at the organic approach (and not just in terms of architecture), I see in it the predominance of the common sense peasant principle that our great-grandfathers had. In Slovakia, organic architecture is generally treated as a stylistic cliché, and this is the result of the fact that it is still only practised by a very small group of people. Of course, in other contexts the same principles lead to fundamentally different architectural results (the work of the recently deceased Swedish architect Erik Asmussen is a case in point).”
The problem is that Slovakia is a very beautiful but very small country, and unfortunately it is in a very degraded state in terms of architecture, and we are not far from the complete eradication of its real assets. It is time, therefore, for all those who care about where and how they will live, where and how their children and grandchildren will live, to overcome the internal obstacles and move in a direction that will not cause further wounds to this country, but will heal and eliminate the existing wounds. I believe it is not too late!
Nor should we overlook the outstanding educational work of Péter Pásztor. He represents the organic thinking that is completely absent from classical architectural education today. Organic thinking based on natural law. The important thing is not that one knows or thinks one knows about spirituality, but that it is a spirituality that is reflected in one’s perception of the practical reality of life. What is it about? As Russell Kirk writes: “Natural law, as a political and legal term, may be defined as a freely arranged set of rules of action, laid down by an authority superior to the state. And, according to the philosophical doctrine of natural law, these rules can be traced back either to divine precepts, or to the fundamental properties of the human being, or to abstract rationality, or to the ancient lessons of mankind.”
[Prepared in 2016]