Zoltán Szentkirályi was one of the most influential professors of architectural history in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century. His career took shape largely in an era when architecture was regarded not as an art form but as an industrial sector responsible for mass production. Within this prevailing intellectual climate, Szentkirályi openly championed the complexity of the architectural arts. He devoted himself to their historical and theoretical questions, equipped with world-class knowledge and erudition. Today he is primarily remembered for his scholarly writings, yet Szentkirályi regarded himself above all as a teacher, believing that the direct transmission of knowledge was far more important than authorship. What remains for posterity are his books and studies; nonetheless, thanks to his pedagogical work at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and at the Master School, several generations of architects continue to carry forward his exceptional intellectual spirit.
He was born into a Transylvanian Reformed pastoral family. Born in 1927 in Debrecen, he pursued his studies at the Reformed Colleges of Debrecen and Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania). In 1944, before completing his school-leaving examination, he and his brother were conscripted during the general mobilisation ordered by the Szálasi government [16 October 1944–28 March 1945] and were sent to the front. After a months-long forced march, both were captured by the Russians and taken to the Focșani collection camp in Romania, where Zoltán contracted typhus, which decimated the camp. The camp authorities dispatched those still capable of work to labour camps, while those deemed too weak for physical labour were sent back to Hungary. His brother, Géza Szentkirályi, was placed in the group bound for the Gulag, but Zoltán exchanged names with him, sending him home – where he had a better chance of survival – and set out for the labour camp under his brother’s name. In the end, Zoltán too returned home to Debrecen, recovered, and completed his school-leaving examination in 1945.
He enrolled at the University of Debrecen to study philosophy, pedagogy, and aesthetics, becoming both a student and demonstrator of the renowned pedagogue Professor Sándor Karácsony. In 1947, however – observing that his mentor was becoming increasingly isolated as the political-ideological shift drew near – Szentkirályi transferred to the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology, where he graduated in 1951. He was deeply influenced by the lectures of Jenő Rados and György Kardos. He turned towards architectural history, later becoming a demonstrator in this department as well. He was appointed assistant lecturer in 1961; earned his technical doctorate in 1964; became associate professor in 1977; full professor in 1990; and, from 1993, head of the Department of Architectural History. He retired from this post in 1998. His academic advancement had been hindered by his refusal to take the required examination in Marxism, which at the time was a prerequisite for any scientific degree.
He amassed enormous erudition, read in five languages, and illustrated his lectures with several thousand diapositives. A highly accomplished draughtsman, he prepared the drawings for many of his own books. Yet he rarely had the opportunity to travel. He received only a single scholarship: a two-week study trip to Italy in 1959. His students elected him ‘teacher of the year’ on several occasions. He led numerous field trips across Hungary, Upper Hungary (Felvidék), and Transylvania. In commemoration of his pedagogical legacy, on the tenth anniversary of his death in 2009 the Faculty of Architecture at BME established the Szentkirályi Zoltán Prize, awarded annually to a member of the faculty who demonstrates outstanding achievement in teaching and mentoring work, whose personality embodies professional integrity, and whose scholarly activity – extending beyond the faculty – is marked by universality.
From 1980 onwards he became involved in the work of the Master School of the Association of Hungarian Architects; alongside Lajos Arnóth and Jenő Szendrői he served as one of its directors, and the study trips he led remained memorable experiences for decades. The secret of Szentkirályi’s exceptional pedagogical impact – beyond his unparalleled erudition and wide-ranging artistic interests – perhaps lay in his conviction, which he consistently articulated, that education is not an act of proclamation but a mutually active process in which master and student shape one another. He formulated his pedagogical principles, as well as the intellectual legacy acquired at the University of Debrecen and consciously continued in the spirit of Sándor Karácsony, in the following terms in a lecture delivered about the Master School: “Sándor Karácsony had an essential saying: one must be born a pedagogue; it is not something that can simply be done. If this is true – and in my view it is – then those born to be pedagogues work in a similar spirit in any field of teaching, regardless of how they started or what they deal with, and this is evidently valid for the Master School and its leadership as well […] Without exception, in every effective pedagogical activity […] one of the fundamental requirements is that the aim is not to condition but to educate, not merely to teach but to join in the mutual acquisition of a body of knowledge. For example, it is often said – indeed, it was one of Beuys’s principles, which he elaborated repeatedly in his lectures – that there is no such thing as a teacher and a student: the teacher is always the one who speaks, and the student the one who listens…”
Among his works on architectural history, the first to be published was Az építészet rövid története (lit. A Short History of Architecture) in 1957, written jointly with Mihály Détschy – a foundational text that has since appeared in numerous editions. Its precise terminology, accessible and engaging style, and the extensive body of illustrations issued in a separate volume render it both readily understandable for the lay reader and genuinely useful for professionals, guiding its audience through the world history of architecture from the ancient Near East to the mid-twentieth century. In 1980 he published – this time as sole author – Az építészet világtörténete (lit. The World History of Architecture), which was the first, and remains the only, comprehensive architectural history written in Hungarian that presents in detail not only the architecture of Western culture but also that of the Eastern civilisations, pre-Columbian America and the Islamic world. Architectural historian András Szalai praised the work as follows: “The book not only presents and discusses the architecture of individual historical periods and certain cultures but also analyses and interprets their architectural achievements according to consistent historical and theoretical criteria, thereby enabling both the specialist and the non-specialist reader to gain a deeper understanding of the general characteristics of architecture.” Achieving all this through the coherent vision and argument of a single author constitutes a rare endeavour even by international standards.
In his writings he devoted considerable attention to Baroque and Renaissance art, and to the relationship between architecture and the allied arts. It is largely owing to him that Baroque art – so far removed from the taste shaped by the cultural policies of the Kádár era [1956-1988] and long met with incomprehension – came to be appreciated by students and readers in its rightful place. He clarified the relationship between the Renaissance and the Baroque, interpreting the static forms of the Renaissance within the temporal dimension characteristic of the Baroque, and, even more importantly, he articulated the general underlying principles of the artistic forms of successive periods: “Irrespective of the artist’s will or consciousness, the artistic form is determined, objectively and to a decisive extent, by three factors: (1) the worldview characteristic of the age, which, relying on the results of the natural sciences, strives to provide a coherent and unified interpretation of all observable phenomena; (2) the psychophysiological characteristics of human beings, historically formed yet essentially unchanged over long periods; (3) and, indirectly through the subject matter, the social conditions.” Through this approach Szentkirályi asserts that worldview and architecture are in close reciprocal interaction – and on this basis the history of architecture may be understood, at the same time, as the history of the human mind.
Alongside his historical syntheses, a less widely acknowledged aspect of his oeuvre concerns architectural theory. In 1967 he published his study A térművészet történeti kategóriái (lit. The Historical Categories of Spatial Art), in which – contrary to the prevailing intellectual climate of the time – he asserted that the creation of form carries a universal meaning, thereby casting the concept of modernity in a new light: “The relationship between architecture and space is not an abstract theoretical problem. Clarifying the relationship between the two has always been an indispensable precondition for ‘modern’ building. It is therefore understandable that in our century it has been examined not only by historians or theoreticians but also by those practising architects who were seeking new directions. And among them, the example of the very greatest shows that for them the concept of ‘architectural space’ never narrowed into a boundedness serving the mode of use – the function – but retained its more universal significance even when solving specific, concrete tasks.”
In his theoretical writings Szentkirályi developed a complex system describing the intellectual tendencies arising from the changing relationship between space, mass and time across different epochs. In truth, even in his works on architectural history he presented this same system, embedded within a concrete historical context. He investigated the universal characteristics of architectural forms, conceiving architecture as the art of spatial organisation. He derived Renaissance architecture from the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato as well as from Pythagorean numerology, which “focus on the solution of two abstract tasks: the examination of the problem of space, and the study of the formal relations that create order among phenomena. From the latter emerged Renaissance proportion theory – the doctrine of harmony believed to be the fundamental law of the universe – and from the former the scientifically exact method of Renaissance spatial interpretation: perspective.”
The significance of his oeuvre was summarised in the following terms by the art historian and museum curator Péter Farbaky in a lecture delivered at the 2014 conference organised in memory of Zoltán Szentkirályi: “His studies cannot deny the era in which they were written. The functionalism of modern architecture is perceptible in them, just as is the definition of architecture as the art of space in opposition to the mass production of the 1950s to the 1970s, and the emphasis on the importance of artistic form: this is Szentkirályi’s clear response to architecture that is shoddy, dehumanised and devoid of soul.”
[2017]