Born in a small village in Vas County, Endre Szűcs’s architectural thinking has been decisively shaped by his family’s ties to Transdanubia and Transylvania. Influenced by his engineer father, he began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture of the Budapest University of Technology and graduated in 1968. He found the politically charged atmosphere of the university oppressive, and the Bauhaus approach, as emphasised in teaching, overly austere and cold. In his commitment to vernacular architecture, Art Nouveau, and historicism – all of which were consciously marginalised at the time – he received encouragement from Imre Makovecz, who served as a university advisor, and with whom he later formed a close personal and professional relationship after joining the Kós Károly Association. In the wake of the events of 1968, several of his fellow students left the country; he, however, to borrow István Orosz’s phrase, did not emigrate in space but in time, finding his point of support in the past as an architect engaged with monuments. ‘Classical’ monument conservation became his field at the outset of his career, and in 1981 he obtained a specialist engineering qualification in heritage protection. While working on design commissions at the Monuments Department of FIMÜV, he encountered the stained-glass windows from the turn of the century. For decades, he has been seeking out, documenting and systematising the masterpieces of stained glass across the lands of historical Hungary. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on this subject and summarised his findings in a landmark, long-missing volume published in 2005, based on years of research conducted with fellow architects (Miklós Dörgő, György Obreczán, and György Földényi) and stained-glass artists (Judit Fűri and Gábor Gonzáles): Megfestett fény – díszüveges munkák a történelmi Magyarország építészetében 1945-ig (lit. Painted Light – Decorative Stained-Glass Works in the Architecture of Historical Hungary up to 1945).
Initially as a staff member of the Monuments Department of FIMÜV, and later as an independent practitioner, he designed a substantial number of monument restoration projects: Simontornya, Franciscan monastery; Soponya, former Zichy manor house; Márkó, Calvary and Calvary chapel (with Tibor Kuslits); Gyöngyös, uncovering Gothic windows in the St Bartholomew’s Church (with György Szekér); Csobánka, Greek Orthodox church (with György Szekér and József Sebestyén); Budapest VII, Rózsák tere, St Elisabeth’s Church, interior restoration and neo-Gothic windows (with György Szekér, Gábor Sugár, Judit Fűri and Gábor Gonzáles); Central Seminary, Budapest (with Gábor Sugár); Gyulakeszi, Eszterházy manor house; Batthyány manor house, Bicske. One of his most significant works was the restoration of the Festetics Castle in Alsóbogát (with Péter Tóth, 2014), which won a Europa Nostra Prize in the European Union’s most prestigious heritage restoration competition. The architects revived both the environment and the Baroque manor from a deathlike state: its windows had long since been broken or stolen, and its walls were damp and mouldy. The committed clients – nationally renowned, Europe-wide respected gallery owners specialising in antiques – envisaged a summer residence here that could later also serve as a permanent home. Accordingly, on the ground floor, they reinstated the original spatial structure in its entirety, demolishing later partition walls. The only new elements were two bathrooms, inserted in place of two former rooms. The only change was the opening of the two salons towards the western terrace, which also restored the disputed asymmetry of the western façade. In the basement, a wine room, lecture space and storage were created, with the original structures re-plastered and the brick vaulting revealed by sandblasting. The original Baroque roof structure remained intact, with faulty elements repaired or replaced. The roof covering was recreated using reclaimed ‘beaver-tail’ tiles. All doors and windows were remanufactured using surviving original elements, and usable parts of the floor were retained. The ceiling fresco in one room on the south side is the work of Dorfmeister, freed by restorers from upper layers; wall investigations in other rooms also revealed further Dorfmeister frescoes. The wings that once closed the ‘U’ shape – destroyed before the nineteenth century – could not be reconstructed during the restoration; instead, the space was enclosed by a newly built brick fence. The delicately calibrated, high-quality interior design also reflects the architects’ work, while the clients selected the furnishings with striking care. As a result of harmonious cooperation between the client and the designers, the restoration earned, in addition to international recognition, the Pro Architectura Prize and an ICOMOS award. In relation to his conservation work, it may be said that Endre Szűcs is among the few professionals who, since his early years as an architect, have rejected the rigid, overly theoretical interpretation of the Venice Charter.
The MÉRMŰ Studio was founded in 1980 under Endre Szűcs’s leadership, initially as Szépítők PJT, with monument restoration as its primary focus. Following the political transition, conservation commissions declined, and their role was taken by the design of tradition-preserving family houses, chiefly in the Balaton Uplands, the Őrség region, and the Great Plain’s farmstead world. Endre Szűcs is an ardent lover of the Balaton Uplands and a leading champion of vernacular architecture that blends with the landscape. He is an obsessive devotee who, even as a ‘bebíró’ – an urban intellectual who moved here in the 1970s – seeks to carry this heritage forward, persuading locals and clients alike of its importance. He understands and can evoke the meaning and wisdom of traditional folk culture, assigning particular significance to the factors of site, landscape and tradition. He is aided in this by his heritage training, his collector’s passion for antiques, and, not least, his childhood memories from Vas County. With his houses, he established a ‘school’ on the northern shore of Lake Balaton: “Instead of pseudo-modern, fashion-dependent architecture, we should love and value what can unfold only here, rooted in our own culture. We must try to conjure poetry and playfulness from architecture too, and resist the vanities of passing global fashions,” he maintains. Through the restoration of more than a hundred residential buildings and press-houses – and the design of new houses built here (Szentbékkálla, Balatoncsicsó, Tihany, Badacsony, Füle, Salföld, Csopak, Dörgicse, Balatonszepezd, Balatonfüred, and Szigliget) – he bears witness to a pronounced tradition-preserving outlook, while always signalling, through refined architectural means, that his buildings are products of their own time. Part of the profession remains perplexed by this attitude, labelled ‘anachronistic’. Endre Szűcs designs for contemporary people: whether a reconstruction built on old analogies or a new house incorporating vernacular elements, the dateability of his buildings is clear to trained eyes. By building new houses that preserve tradition, he also assumes a serious value-saving role. Wherever he designs, he begins with an understanding of the landscape and the traditional settlement structure; his buildings, in scale, façade materials and colour, fit into the surviving village image – or into the village image that once displayed a unified formal language. Faithful adherence to tradition and minute knowledge of each region characterise the detailing of every building: the eaves, chimney, openings, plaster ornaments, and even the fence. In his plans, while preserving the rational layout of the three-part Hungarian peasant house, divided by transverse walls, he typically creates a larger opening between the room and the kitchen, where alongside the cookstove and traditional heating devices, contemporary kitchen and building services equipment also appears. In interior design, he is supported by his sons, Kenéz, a restorer specialising in traditional heating installations, and Apor, a ceramicist producing stove tiles and folk ceramics. In roof coverings, he likewise favours traditional materials suited to the character of the place (tile, reclaimed tile, thatch). The distinctive way the street-facing porch begins has by now become a recurring Tracery motif, as has the emphasis on entrances with a kódisállás [small roofed entrance shelter characteristic of Őrség vernacular houses]. Where the conversion of the attic is requested – undeniably a demand of contemporary life – he seeks to apply individualised solutions.
Few things demonstrate his devotion more clearly than the story of his own property. The dilapidated house at the edge of the village, long uninhabited, he first listed as a monument and then began to restore with the restraint and humility appropriate to such status. He designed the lower part of the street façade and the courtyard porch based on traces found on site. He adapted the plan to present-day needs, opening the small pantry off the porch into the interior room. By glazing the rear porch arch, he created additional living space. He rebuilt the demolished fence, and as a millennial offering, he and his family constructed a Way of the Cross along their plot boundary. The fourteen stations of the Calvary have been completed, for now with two artworks by Miklós Melocco and Mária Petrás.
A synthesis of his Balaton Uplands work can be seen at the Szent Donát Winery on Szita Hill in Csopak. Through a joyful process of play, the ensemble took shape in three phases: from an earth-cut cellar to a large complex combining a winery, wine bar, restaurant, and guesthouse. The result is the embrace of a two-storey Balaton Uplands press-house and a porch-fronted dwelling.
Through the restoration of a listed press-house in the Balaton Uplands, Endre Szűcs came into contact with the chief organisers of the construction of the Kárpát-haza templom (Carpathian Homeland Church): András Szabó and Mayor Farkas Bethlen. In Verőce, on a hill in one of the valleys leading to Katalinpuszta, stands a small ecumenical church, raised through public donations and built by communal labour in memory of the 90th anniversary of Trianon and in honour of Hungarian national cohesion. The kiln-chapel, built by analogy with bread-baking ovens traceable to the single-nave Árpád-period churches, has whitewashed walls and is roofed with natural slate. Its tower is crowned by a stylised double cross growing out of the ‘triple mound’. The same form appears in the interior as the interplay of two colours of reclaimed brick, marking the main axis running towards the millstone altar table. The interior vault curves over a row of stained-glass windows: on the main axis, Emese is shown in the lap of the Turul bird, while the ceiling decoration is inspired by the story of Prince Csaba – from Emese, raised to the sky, a ‘star-path’ leads to Babba Maria, placed at the centre of the vault. As master, Endre Szűcs accepted his outstanding pupil, Péter Tóth, as a creative partner in designing this pilgrimage church – contemporary yet in every detail grounded in ancient traditions – born of a synthesis of precise knowledge of architectural history, iconography, stained glass and vernacular building.
The Mérmű creative workshop, led by Endre Szűcs, embraces a wide range of architectural tasks; its name is associated with the reconstruction of Sopron’s Main Square and inner-city streets, and with the design of the promenade along the town walls (with Ágnes Vladár, Csaba Sallós, Tamás Dósa Papp, and landscape designer Károly Örsi).
All this also makes clear that Endre Szűcs has been drawn to vernacular architecture since his student years. He sought the secret: what makes the huts, peasant and burgher houses, churches and inns of our ancestors unmistakably Hungarian. He drew his way across almost the entire Carpathian Basin, especially Transylvania. As a scholarship holder of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 1993 and 1996, he researched the vernacular architecture of Gyimes with the architect Attila Zakariás from Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe), during which time approximately one hundred buildings were surveyed and photographed. Thereafter, they preserved the Gyimes houses not only in drawings and academic dissertations but also in reality: they bought old buildings destined for demolition, dismantled them, and rebuilt them in their village museum at Gyimesközéplok (Lunca de Jos), which is operated as a foundation. The initiative, launched in 1990, was joined by Levente Salat and his wife, Erzsébet Zakariás, as well as their Dutch friend, Pieter de Haan. The houses are furnished with furniture and everyday objects collected in the region. At present, eighteen buildings and a chapel stand on the site.
Endre Szűcs has been an architect for nearly fifty years, and he has spent most of that half-century preserving monuments and old houses, and on restorations and the design of new buildings in environments of historical depth. For his outstanding work in renewing the traditional architecture of the Balaton Uplands; for his activities in monument protection, particularly the documentation and rescue of vernacular architectural values; and for his research into the world-class stained-glass works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hungarian architecture, he received the Ybl Prize in 2014. In 1990, he was awarded the commemorative plaque for Hungarian monument protection; he twice received the Architectural Award of Excellence; in 2006, he was honoured with the Hungarian Republic’s Gold Cross of Merit. He has won more than a dozen ‘House of the Year’ awards; in 2011, he received the Pro Architectura Prize, and in 2013, a Europa Nostra Prize for the restoration of the Festetics small manor in Alsóbogát. The studio he leads has operated successfully for three decades; as a member of the Kós Károly Association, which represents Hungarian organic architecture, he serves as a mentor at the Vándoriskola (Travelling School). For fourteen years, he served on the Sopron chief architect’s jury and is currently a member of the chief architect’s jury in Szentendre and Óbuda–Békásmegyer. He publishes regularly and serves as an editor of Országépítő. He cultivates Polish–Hungarian architectural relations. He is a member of the Section of Architecture at the Hungarian Academy of Arts and serves as the section’s liaison for Hungarian–Polish relations.
[2016]