ARS POETICA
I intended to become a musician, but my god chose me to be an architect. On my father’s side there were both musicians and architects in the family. But my father’s vocation captivated me, and I tried to become an architect. I am still trying to do so, remembering my father, Mihály Vadász – together with my sons, Gyuri and Bence, and my grandson Balázs. It is a beautiful – uplifting, but often bitter – anointment, yet we continue according to our faith and abilities. We are already the fifth generation. And do you know when I am truly happy? When I sit down to draw – and among the free runs, surges and hesitations of the lines, among trees, plants, mountains, waters and the suns and moons of the Skies, the HOUSE slowly appears, and under the spell of two dimensions the miracle of the drawing rises up – the Building makes the World more complete by another carved stone, and with happiness I continue my work and do so as long as my God, my Old Friend, who has lived from eternity, allows it.
“For me, architecture is the three-dimensional play of the fairy-tale world, the creation of the playful human being, the homo ludens, where architecture must, of course, fundamentally master the engineering requirements of function, structure, stability and spatiality, yet at the same time it must also participate in the magic of dreaming and tale-making, which belongs to the infinite and unfathomable secrets of the playful human being.”
It is exceedingly rare in the history of Hungarian architecture for four consecutive generations of the same family to follow the same vocation. György Vadász, born in 1933, followed in his father’s footsteps and became an architect, and he in turn was followed by his son, Bence Vadász, and later by one of his grandsons, Balázs Vadász. This unbroken continuity has produced truly unique works within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hungarian architecture; at the same time, it highlights that the tradition stretching from the Middle Ages to modernity – according to which the craft knowledge inherited within a family offers more than what a master–apprentice relationship alone can provide – may well remain a valid model in the twenty-first century.
György Vadász’s father, Mihály Vadász, was a significant architect of the 1930s and 1940s and one of the foremost Hungarian followers of the Bauhaus. Early in his career he worked in Emil Bauer’s office, contributing to the design of the Corvin Cinema and the apartment buildings in Corvin köz. In 1933 he opened a joint practice with his friend and colleague, Gábor Preisich, and over the following years a number of iconic modernist buildings in Budapest were created from their designs, including the Simplon House on Bartók Béla út, as well as apartment buildings on Krisztina körút and Margit körút, and even the beach bath at Balatonföldvár was executed according to their plans. As a highly talented draftsman, Mihály Vadász also designed posters. After 1938 he continued his work independently. He lived with his family in the villa he designed for himself on Torbágyi Street (now Rácz Aladár Street).
He was born here in 1933 as the couple’s only child, György Vadász, whom his parents showered with affection. Thanks to the family’s intellectual interests, lively social life, and wide circle of friends, he grew up surrounded by rich cultural experiences. The atmosphere of his childhood home established his close connection to literature, the visual arts, and music, and – above all – shaped his freedom-loving, playful, ever-curious nature, full of humour. Like his father, he drew exceptionally well. In his youth he planned to become a musician; he played the piano with such talent that Aladár Rácz, the cimbalom virtuoso who lived on the same street – already an internationally celebrated musician at the time – would often sit outside the house on a small folding chair just to listen to the teenage boy play.
Between 1947 and 1951 he attended the Toldy Ferenc Gymnasium in Buda, where he was taught by excellent teachers and surrounded by classmates such as Ferenc Vámossy, the future distinguished architectural historian, and Lajos Sváby, who later became a notable painter. The gymnasium years were, for György Vadász, a worthy continuation of what he remembered as a paradisiacal childhood. By the time he reached his final year, it had become clear that he would choose architecture over musical studies; as he later recalled, he was captivated by “the delight of creating something out of nothing, of bringing a drawing to life and watching it become three-dimensional.”
After completing his final examinations, he was admitted in 1951 straight into the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology. There he formed friendships with László Iványi, Jenő Rimanóczy, György Sándor, György Kévés and György Tokár (the latter two later became frequent collaborators). Among his professors, those who influenced him most deeply were Károly Weichinger, Károly Dávid, Pál Csonka, Jenő Rados, Frigyes Pogány and Antal Reischl. He earned his degree in 1957, and already the following year, 1958, he continued his professional training at the Master School of the Association of Hungarian Architects. The third cycle of the Master School, led by Jenő Szendrői, carried forward the most progressive traditions of the earlier cycles and embraced the principles of modern and late-modern architecture as its clear orientation. The students worked in design institutes alongside their masters; under the guidance of János Böhönyey, György Vadász studied together with Béla Borvendég, Ernő Südi and György Tokár. During the two-year programme, architectural history and contemporary building technologies were taught alongside the sister arts and literature – an approach that reinforced the love of the arts he had inherited from home, and which later shaped his conviction that architecture and the visual arts form an organic – and, in his view, inseparable – unity. (This cohort marked the end of the first period in the history of the Master School; deemed too “free-spirited,” the programme was shut down in 1960 and only revived a decade later.)
After graduating, he first joined state architecture company BUVÁTI, but in the same year he moved to another state firm Iparterv. At that time, this design office served as a refuge for the representatives of modern architecture. The architectural elite of the 1930s and 1940s worked there – figures such as Alfréd Hajós, István Medgyaszay, László Lauber, Gedeon Gerlóczy and Károly Dávid. From the 1960s onward, young talents arrived as well: Zoltán Gulyás, Jenő Rimanóczy, Olga Mináry, Ferenc Callmeyer, Károly Polónyi, Péter Molnár and others. From 1964, Vadász returned to BUVÁTI, where he designed for more than two decades. Many important buildings date from this period, first among them the pavilion of the Tétényi Road (today Szent Imre) Hospital (1971), for which he received the Ybl Prize. A work particularly dear to him was the diplomats’ residential building on Árnyas Street in Buda (1973), designed together with Anna Perczel. The building responds with great sensitivity to the site conditions: on a sloping hillside it steps downward across six levels, shifting the floors, with apartments arranged between transverse walls and a plastic appearance from every viewpoint. The dark-blue pyrogranite cladding and the curved artificial-stone parapets lend the façade a traditional, handcrafted character – a kind of turning back toward historical architecture. Imre Makovecz praised the work as follows: “The building (...) is among those rare structures of exceptional rank and refinement. This rank derives from the natural elegance of its level of aspiration and the beauty of its materials. (...) The beautiful, well-crafted house by György Vadász and his colleagues is a creation made with great diligence and excellent taste – something that, in our design-office system, can only be brought to life through unpaid enthusiasm and a kind of obsessiveness. This ‘obsessiveness’, whatever direction or discipline it may take, is the true foundation of all progress.” (Magyar Építőművészet, 1974/5)
His attraction to plastic, sculptural forms manifested itself in his next major work as well: the Mohács National Memorial Garden, inaugurated on 29 August 1976, on the 450th anniversary of the tragic battle. In Vadász’s total-art conception, the memorial garden – which commemorates the 1,700 Hungarian soldiers who fell here – became an exceptionally complex work that appeals simultaneously to reason and emotion; it synthesises architecture, visual art, landscape design and archaeology, as well as national sentiment and collective homage. The elements of the central composition – the gate formed from two arcs that do not touch, whose wings are woven from bronze “bones”; the museum space sunk into the ground; the grass rings recalling the movements of the former battle; the grass-covered mound created over the mass grave; the carved wooden grave-markers (kopjafák) bearing traditional motifs; the sculpturally conceived drinking fountains; the hidden lighting – all reinforce one another as equal components conveying the message of the site.
It is important to emphasise that Vadász collaborated here with several of the era’s most significant visual artists: sculptors István Bencsik, Gyula Illés, Miklós Melocco, Róbert Csíkszentmihályi, Pál Kő, Sándor Kiss, Géza Samu and József Király, as well as goldsmith József Pölöskei. (In 2011, the ensemble was expanded with a new visitor centre modelled on the Holy Crown, also designed by György Vadász.)
At the Árnyas Street house and the Mohács memorial site, a flower motif appeared in different contexts, and it resurfaced in the Sáringer House in Buda, designed in 1976. Here Vadász organized a honeycomb-like, centralised mass around the hearth, demonstrating that contemporary architecture can indeed integrate the archaic house model, which traditionally formed around the hearth, the warmth that held the family together, and shared meals. In the same period, he also designed the MEDOSZ guesthouse for Budapest’s Jókai Square (1979), where he boldly energised the small, narrow plot wedged between two firewalls, fitting the building into the urban order with a new-brutalist façade and disciplined massing.
It was likewise in the 1970s that the long, multi-year planning process began through which György Vadász renewed and modernised the centre of Zalaegerszeg, transforming it into an urban landscape that reflected the character of the Zala region. The first phase of the development was completed in 1980 and was met with unreserved success: both the profession and the city immediately embraced the eight-storey buildings that replaced the former single-storey main street – even though they were constructed with the tunnel-formwork technology considered modern at the time but outdated today. Nicknamed the “Lace Houses” by locals, the ensemble became a charming and beloved presence thanks to its dynamic, modern yet historically evocative façade plasticity, its varied roof forms, and its vivid colours. Its vertical rhythms and passageways evoked the rising and falling contours of the Zala hills.
The next major work was completed in 1981: with a brilliant composition, Vadász gave architectural form to the surroundings of the newly constructed Gellért Hill reservoir. The design, created in collaboration with András Széll, is simultaneously landscape shaping and architecture. The exterior, earthwork-like walls of the reservoir, which cut into the green hillside, were framed within a system of concrete retaining walls that expressed tectonic forces – an approach reflecting the sudden emergence of postmodern attitudes in the early 1980s. The composition is articulated with varied plantings, stairways, terraces, and flower-trough walls. Although its function was to conceal an engineering structure, it became the “emotional high point” of the Gellért Hill walking route. And just as at the Mohács memorial site, the visual arts again became a natural companion to Vadász’s architecture: the sculptural ensemble on the lookout terrace – depicting Buda and Pest as king and queen yearning toward one another – was created by sculptor Márta Lesenyei, while the bronze base beneath their feet, representing the two city districts and the ribbon of the Danube, was designed by György Vadász himself.
A noteworthy element of his oeuvre, designed almost simultaneously with the Gellért Hill composition, is the Krisztinaváros Crossbar building. The romanticism that had by then become a clear hallmark of Vadász’s work – which he blended with great skill into the new tools of construction technology – appears here only in the massing, while the building presents itself unambiguously as a technical structure. Its metal and glass surfaces, square grid, and mirror panels reflecting the traffic of Városmajor Street all convey the mysterious world of rapidly expanding telephone use. Yet the atrium interior and the rooftop garden introduce elements that make the workplace inviting. And the attentive observer will notice that the way the function is projected onto the building’s mass follows a way of thinking very similar to that which produced the Gellért Hill reservoir.
If we look for connections within the diversity of his oeuvre, the question arises: is György Vadász’s architecture new or traditional, emotional or innovative, postmodern or vernacular? He himself gives the answer in an interview:
“…postmodern architecture is an instinctive human protest against the dominance of technicism, against laboratory-like cleanliness. Postmodernism is an unstrained, witty and ironic continuation of the Bauhaus. One of its defining components is irony. But this irony is only an exciting shell – inside, emotions lie hidden. In my work I have tried to smuggle emotion, even romanticism, into the very disciplined framework.” (Interview by János Frank, Élet és Irodalom, 6 June 1981)
In the mid-1980s, György Vadász left BUVÁTI and, together with several young architects, founded his own practice: the Artunion Széchenyi Architectural Studio, which later became the independent Budapest division of PÉCSITERV. It was during this period that the creative image emerged which would characterize him throughout his long and active life: he created an open, inclusive environment around himself, loved working with younger colleagues, was able to learn from the next generation, and deeply valued his collaborators. He designed the Krisztina Crossbar together with Judit Horváth; the villa on Tündér Street with Ildikó Ádám; the reconstruction of the main square in Baja with Péter Czér; the twin villa on Mátyás Király Road with László Váncza; the Koldus-kapu (Beggars’ Gate) in the Buda Castle with his son, Bence Vadász; and, later, the Hungarian pavilion at the 2000 World Expo in Hannover – a project of major international acclaim – in collaboration with Péter Basa and Gergely Fernezelyi. In 1991 he founded Vadász és Tsai Építőművész Kft., which has operated ever since in Kmety Street near the City Park. (In 2012, a tragic fire broke out in the building’s attic, destroying decades’ worth of plans and documentation, but with substantial help and support from friends, the studio was rebuilt within eleven months.)
From here Vadász continued the redesign of the Pásztó town centre, begun a few years earlier, and new commissions followed one after another: urban-centre developments, residential blocks and terraced houses in Pásztó, Baja, Szolnok and Balatonalmádi. Among these, the New-Bauhaus residential park on Beregszászi Street, completed in 1997, stands out. In this project he adapted the Bauhaus tradition represented by his father, Mihály Vadász, to the late twentieth century, using recessed glass and wall surfaces, rich plasticity, roof gardens, and massing that, despite its density, seems almost to float as it opens towards its surroundings.
In the meantime, from the mid-1990s onward, Vadász’s work shows a marked tendency toward simplification. The holiday house in Szigliget (1993) – with its archaic appearance, stone walls, and entrance recalling the door of traditional wine cellars – the burial mound erected for the 750th anniversary of the Battle of Muhi (1991), with its tilting crosses and spiral path leading into the tumulus, and his own house in Szentendre (1996), raised on stilts and built of wood and brick, seeming almost to float through its lightness – all turn with increasing intensity toward archaic house types, while their emblematic, symbolic character grows stronger. The culmination of this process is represented by the Hungarian Pavilion at the Hannover Expo (2000) and the ecumenical chapel in Sénye (2002).
The wooden “ship” of the Hannover pavilion is an extremely simple yet highly suggestive form, to the point that it is difficult to decide whether it is a building or a sculpture. Between the two twenty-metre-high, larch-clad, curved shells – which expand upward and do not meet – visitors could walk freely, creating a sheltered, atmospheric open-air gathering place. The “ship” interpretation is unmistakable, yet the pavilion can also be seen as a tilted, stylized flower chalice, continuing Vadász’s characteristic use of the flower motif.
In 2000, alongside loud success, a grave setback also arrived: the competition for designing the National Theatre was won by György Vadász with a refined plan drawing on classical modernism, yet a deeply unjust administrative intervention – the restriction of the architect’s authority – resulted in Siklós Mária’s design being realized instead of the winning proposal. Many creators would have been crushed by such a story, but Vadász’s inner serenity carried him beyond it, and two years later the chapel of the small Zala County village of Sénye was born, which its designer called “God’s Oven”. The small, white, hood-shaped building with a glass roof radiates timelessness – peace between God and humankind, a cave-like refuge for the person exhausted by the noise of the world. With its circular floor plan and cross-shaped opening, which can be regarded as a stained-glass descendant of Gothic cathedrals, it is at once intimate and expansive, timeless and contemporary, proclaiming the harmony of natural forms and the built world.
His final major work, the Radnóti Miklós Cultural Center in Budapest, was completed in 2011. The flower motif is present here as well: at the core of the four-winged building – in the “stamen” of the “flower” – lies a central recreational space, around which a 600-seat auditorium (the RAM Colosseum, home to the ExperiDance Dance Company), a library, a senior club, and a restaurant are arranged. The wings are connected to the center by glass-covered links, and the small plazas formed between the parts gently articulate the overall mass. It is a subtle, modest, functional building which, through its symbolism, is also friendly and engaging within the densely built urban district.
Until his final years, György Vadász remained a continuously active creator, and his talents extended far beyond architecture. His sculptures and memorials – among them the Gábor Áron memorial in Pasarét with its copper-lined cannonball (1984); the aforementioned Beggars’ Gate, in which sculptor Pál Kő, the designer’s heartfelt friend and creative partner, placed a miniature statue of the ever-playful Vadász (1995); or the Hídvigyázók (Bridge Guards) in Tahi (1999) – all evoke, in the viewer’s mind, the shared intersection of humanity and the world, of history and the present.
He was a truly free spirit, bound by neither styles nor precedents, and he acknowledged no genre boundaries – yet he never argued feverishly for his own position. He would simply lay the plan on the table, cheerfully, jokingly, as someone unwilling to take notice of the world’s duller side. Nor did he pay attention to entrenched camps. For this reason, from the late 1980s onward, as Hungarian architecture increasingly split into two factions – the “organics” and the “moderns” – he became a unique link between them, even an integrating force. He received every possible prize with which an architect can be honored in Hungary: the Ybl Prize in 1972, the Small Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary in 1993, the Kossuth Prize in 1998, the title Artist of the Nation in 2014, and membership in the Hungarian Academy of Arts in 2023. Yet these were not what truly mattered to him, but rather good company, good wine, his family, and above all: beauty, of which he remained a devoted worshipper until the very last moment of his life.
Beneath his playful artistic soul, gratitude was perhaps the deepest driving force: gratitude for being able to work, design, write poetry, and create sculptures; gratitude for being loved by many; and perhaps most of all, gratitude for being able to enjoy life freely, for his own delight. He was a true Renaissance man, possessing deep knowledge and deep faith, which he wove into his every building, sculpture, and human relationship.
[2025]