At the outset of his career, Bence Vadász, DLA found himself in a dual position. On the one hand, he inherited a stable architectural outlook from his father, György Vadász, a Kossuth Prize–winning architect who himself was born into an architectural family, as well as from his grandfather, Mihály Vadász. On the other hand, starting from the security provided by these familial inspirations, he was also compelled to find his own creative path. This meant stepping out of a familiar creative comfort zone towards free-form design – a move that opened up entirely new dimensions for him. As he himself has stated: “In this sense, perhaps this present moment – this phase of composition – is the one that essentially encapsulates that ‘personal architectural history’ which I preserve, draw upon, and make use of in my heart, my instincts, and my consciousness, and which also allows me to distance myself from it – in order to venture into special, hitherto unknown and wondrous architectural territories.”
Family Inspirations
“Young, impetuous, bold, and ignorant, I believed – ‘it is only me on this path’. But very quickly I realised how much is encoded in my ‘architectural genetics’ – how many messages I receive across space and time – how many familial impulses, images, colours, drawings, and silhouettes define my lines – and thus, whether I wanted to or not, I came to understand that I am also one station along a ‘century-long arc’. Today I know and feel that without the architecture of my father and my grandfather, I would not be – could not be – who I am, either as a human being or as an architect.” This is the conviction of Bence Vadász, a member of the youngest generation of architects, whose predecessors include his grandfather Mihály Vadász, active during the 1920s and 1930s, and his father György Vadász, who has been among the most prominent figures of Hungarian architecture since the 1960s. For the young Bence Vadász, his grandfather’s architecture proved to be a particularly revealing discovery – a kind of “national BAUHAUS”. Alongside his modernist works of the 1930s, Mihály Vadász strove to shape his pure BAUHAUS compositions in harmony with the landscape and their surroundings. In his free-standing, sculptural buildings, he naturally composed according to the canon, creating iconic works (such as the Symplon House). Yet as elements of continuous urban street frontages, or within lush natural environments, he readily employed traditional pitched roofs, rubble stone cladding, or even tower spires. This was because he respected the “spirit of place” more than stylistic constraints (for example, the villas in Rácz Aladár Street and Tusnádi Street, or the residential building in Őrs vezér Street). Bence Vadász refers to this approach as “gentle BAUHAUS”. Alongside his architectural work, the grandfather found a form of “restorative” creative occupation in producing coloured-pencil compositions, collages, and montages.
Mihály Vadász’s cubist mode of composition exerted a clear influence on the creation of the Margit Ház (Margit House) office building, which Bence Vadász conceived as a “response” to the modernist precedents of Margit körút (Lajos Kozma – Átrium, the buildings of Dezső Dúl, Hofstatter – Dugattyús Ház). With this work, he achieved his first major professional success. In 2001, this public building was awarded the Pro Architectura Prize.
In the case of the Margit Ház (Margit House), erected on a plot in Budapest’s 2nd district bounded by Tölgyfa Street and Bem József Street, the architect’s functional way of thinking came clearly to the fore. The site lies among industrial buildings and temporary construction barracks, in a heterogeneous environment of old and new, good and bad, residential and public buildings – yet at the same time it is positioned within a “visual axis” from Margit körút, drawn towards the Danube, and located at a busy transport junction. The building’s required functions were equally diverse – a humane office building with flexible rental possibilities, a ground-floor petrol station and drive-through for vehicles, and hospitality functions – all contained within a single building block. The point of departure was the recognition and correct interpretation of a spatial structure worth preserving, as well as of defining characteristics such as scale and optical character (rhythm, plasticity, material, colour, etc.). The physical and intellectual energy radiated by the new building was intended to electrify its entire surroundings, creating a visual dialogue between the existing and the new elements of the built spatial sequence. The Margit Ház (Margit House) integrates into the “linguistic confusion” of its environment in such a way that it makes almost no use of direct formal references. Rather than interpreting its context as an architectural phenomenon, it reads it as a visual one.
Although part of the Margit Ház (Margit House) is raised on pilotis and it also features a roof garden, its spirit is far removed from that of the 1930s. The building presents a different face from every direction. Its massing is defined by a simple formula – the composition of a rectangular block and an inserted, rotated cube – which determines both the layout of the floor plans and the richly articulated structure of the façades. This, too, is a regular white cubic form, its elevations often punctuated by the seriously adopted circular porthole windows of Le Corbusier’s ship metaphor. On the flat roof, a smaller structure with a floating canopy and a zinc-clad, curved roof ridge rises prominently. These smaller and larger elements, although technically serving as enclosures for mechanical equipment, in the hands of a skilled architect become opportunities for sculptural form-making. In doing so, they introduce a new scale and usable space, ultimately offering a sense of future both to local residents and to those who will come here to work. The changes articulated on the façades simultaneously signal internal, functional transitions. The most dynamic elevation is that along Bem József Street, where one almost experiences the symbiosis of two buildings fused together. The balance of the façade is achieved through the finely modulated interplay of horizontal and vertical elements. Horizontal limestone bands, elongated openings, horizontally emphasised windows with canopies, and ship-window motifs rhythmically articulate the white wall surface of the section that accommodates a petrol station on the ground floor.
Alongside the row of pilotis, the curved mass of the entrance and the set-back top floor, a small, projecting box painted yellow evokes a sense of astonishment – just as, on the other wing of the building, a curved motif rising from the recessed, glazed upper storey produces a similar effect. This culminates in the ship-like body of the representative meeting room, from which a breathtaking view opens up over the surrounding “forest” of rooftops.
The most unified façade is the one facing Tölgyfa Street, where harmony is established through the alignment of openings and limestone bands, complemented by a series of French balconies, as well as by the meeting of stone, zinc sheet, rendered surfaces, and grey granite cladding. The entrance is accentuated by yellow, red, and blue elements. This Mondrian-like use of colour reappears in the carefully designed, custom-made reception desks. The wave motif that appears at the entrance portal is echoed in the pavement pattern of the sidewalk, in the changes of colour and surface treatment within the circulation areas, and in the design of the planting beds and paving of the inner courtyard façade. The glass surfaces are substantial in size, yet not continuous. As a result, the image of the facing spatial wall does not return as a simple mirror reflection but rather as a sequence of fragmented, framed views that change in response to the movement of the observer. Each floor maintains a direct relationship with the courtyard.
Bence Vadász was also given the opportunity to take an active role in the design of the interior spaces. His architectural proposal offered a reassuring and convincing response to the architectural, urban-planning, and architectural-historical questions that arose – a response that was accepted by the district’s distinguished architectural jury (Professor György Szrogh, Tamás Vajai, DLA, Balázs Balogh, DLA – President of the Hungarian Chamber of Architects (Magyar Építész Kamara), György Radványi, DLA, as well as representatives of the local municipality). Among the plan’s merits, the jury highlighted the rhythm of the building’s articulation, its light–shadow effects, its use of materials and colour, and its subtle references to the architecture of the 1930s. At a professional evening organised by Új Magyar Építőművészet (New Hungarian Architecture) in April 2000, the building was ranked among the ten finest works of contemporary Hungarian architecture.
Continuing within this architectural world, Bence Vadász created the Schlotter Ház (Schlotter House) (Diósd – single-family house, 2016), whose box-like vocabulary already leans towards minimalism; the Gallello Ház (Gallello House) (single-family house in Cenk Street, Buda – 2005), which stands as an imprint of transparent architecture; and the buildings of the Láng Sport- és Szabadidőközpont (Láng Sports and Leisure Centre) (Budapest, 13th district, Rozsnyai Street – 2003–2010). Here, the hall building (2004), with its hand-thrown brick surfaces, represents a humane reinterpretation of the “gentle BAUHAUS”, while the long, white “Main Building” (2010) may be read as a loose paraphrase of Alfréd Hajós.
In the same spirit, the late-twentieth-century re-tuning of De Stijl, articulated through the colours of Gerrit Rietveld, appears in the Béke úti Fecskeház (Swallow House on Béke Road) (2007 – co-designer Miklós M. Miltényi). The building of the Budakeszi Mosolyvár bölcsőde (Mosolyvár Nursery School, Budakeszi) (2014–2019 – co-designer Balázs Vadász) represents an attempt to strip modernist composition to its utmost essence, where the “message” becomes legible without additive elements – emerging solely from the interplay of honest, functionalist, snow-white masses and from the dynamics of light and shadow.
The architecture of his father, György Vadász, and the attitude of his entire “being” towards the surrounding world – including the unbridled nature of “free associations” – have been, and continue to be, defining influences for Bence Vadász, both in his architectural thinking and in the creation of his compositions. Unlike his grandfather, his father created without stylistic constraints, and this example reinforced in him the conviction that every spatial question – every architectural task – may be answered with a unique and unrepeatable personal response. One that can be formulated only then, only there, and only by the creator. “For – beyond the rationally articulated ‘problem-solving’ – if a work is personal, filled with faith and heart, it gains an added dimension and may be elevated into an inspired and ‘poetic message’.” Works by György Vadász conceived in this spirit include the “ship”-shaped Hannover Hungarian Pavilion, the Gellért Hill water reservoir formed as a “fragmented rock”, and the Muhi Memorial Site, with its hill studded with crosses. His drawings likewise share this soaring quality: animated, dynamic, and vibrating black ink graphics. Lights, flames, trees, flight – and only rarely, relegated to the background, the “static” houses.
Holding this inheritance in his heart, mind, and hands, Bence Vadász went on to design his more freely composed buildings. The Lágymányos building of the Nissan Headquarters (2001, Budapest, 9th district, Máriássy Road) is a complex assembled from additive elements, which alludes to the operating company’s past and cultural affiliation through Asian formal gestures (“pagoda”) and architectural accents. The strict, geometric white masses and the sharply angled roof silhouette of the houses in the T5 block of the Péterhegyi OTP Housing Estate (2002) act as a counterpoint to the softly contoured buildings with curved roofs standing opposite them. They enter into a dialogue, responding to one another – like the pages of a book, where the “runic script” of one page is answered by an “Arabic script” on the other. The award-winning OTP apartment buildings in Szolnok (2001 – Szolnok, Városmajor Road) are characterised by a snow-white cubist base mass refined with pastel-coloured wooden façade inserts. In this way, the severity of formulaic modernist composition is transformed into a small-town atmosphere, further reinforced by the organising and unifying effect of the pitched roof with its pronounced, characteristically overhanging eaves. In these buildings, both the grandfather’s compositional principles and the father’s romantic “eclectic” mode of thinking can be clearly discerned. The Origó Ház (Origo House) in the 13th district (2004 – Budapest, Petneházy Street – co-designer Zoltán Miklós) attempts to ease the density and monotony of Újlipótváros’s continuous street-front developments through humane architectural gestures. The required (and strictly enforced) maximisation of floor area in infill developments – and the large street-facing mass that results – is rendered more human in scale through the use of natural materials (reclaimed brick) and through unique, sensitive detailing (lintels, bricks turned on their side with “stamped” faces, and strong light–shadow effects).
The Heléna Ház (Helena House) in the 6th district (2003 – Budapest, Káldy Gyula Street) offers another example of this drive towards humanisation, here within a listed historic environment – on the site of a former building by Vilmos Freund. The late-modern spatial and massing approach of the turn of the twentieth century is here enveloped in an exterior skin rich in historical references – incorporating friezes transferred from the former Freund building, a cornice line constructed according to principles of contextual fitting, and, recalling the virtuosity of grand bourgeois construction, a statue of Helen of Troy placed in the entrance hall (a work by sculptor Kálmán Veres). This building carries within it the family’s architectural antecedents, while at the same time functioning, in a sense, as an intellectual precursor to the Szabad György Office Building, realised some fifteen years later.
Other Inspirations
With his familial precedents carried in his heart, Bence Vadász set out along new paths. He allowed his art to be shaped not only by his inherited legacy but also by the influence of other masters. He rediscovered – now consciously, beyond visual and emotional catharsis – the writings, figures, and systems of thought that had been, or became, important to him. The books of Frank Lloyd Wright on geometrically organic composition and farm architecture; Erich Mendelsohn’s observatory (which later served as one of the architectural inspirations for the Meininger Hotel); the buildings of Antoni Gaudí; the bold use of colour by Luis Barragán; and the compositions of Álvaro Siza all became defining reference points. As a complementary counterpart to the organic line, the pared-back geometric minimalism of Márcio Kogan, along with the courage of Brutalism’s honest, industrial concrete architecture, also exerted a significant influence on his work.
Beyond the Comfort Zone
The Vaskút School, completed in 1997, was born from the combined influence of familial foundations, personal architectural explorations, and the impact of newly rediscovered distant masters. In its massing, material use, and formal language, it deliberately alludes to the architecture of medieval “border fortresses”, symbolically indicating not only that the building itself stands in a “borderland” in need of protection, but also that its creator was venturing into the borderlands of his own architectural language. The competition for the 16th district sports hall in 2012 proved to be an exciting and instructive attempt to explore how a public building might be generated through the “folding” of a clad terrain – that is, by stepping from two dimensions into three. Here, for the first time in his architecture, appeared the idea of geometric bands that emerge from the ground, run through the entire composition, rise from the horizontal plane onto the building’s silhouette, and then subside once more. (Co-designer: Zoltán Miklós.) In the same year, the design for an Ecumenical Glass Chapel planned for a forest near Békéscsaba represented another experiment – one that sought to invert the relationship between “outside” and “inside”, between exterior and interior spaces – a form of transparent, inverse architecture aimed at expanding a small, cultic interior space (in both material and spiritual terms) towards the infinite. Zoltán Miklós was also his co-designer on the competition proposal for the Budaörs Water Reservoir: a spatially elevated cubist painting shaped according to the principles of Brutalist concrete architecture and minimalism, and composed using the colours of De Stijl.
Major Works
Bence Vadász regards the following two buildings as the most important milestones of his contemporary and present-day architectural practice. Both differ markedly from the architectural traditions of the Vadász dynasty, yet at the same time both emerge organically from what preceded them.
THE MEININGER HOTEL (2011–2019 – co-designer Zoltán Miklós)
Bence Vadász: Magyar táncok (Hungarian Dances)
(Hotel on Csarnok Square)
Sluggishly the rhythm stirs
within the sorrowful cloak of concrete,
yet today it steps into a joyful dance,
escaping the harsh, rigid cage.
As if the wind were gently catching hold,
the rhythm quickens,
the whip cracks as curves retort to one another,
grappling, then smoothing themselves out –
undulating ribbons,
the wild unfurling of Hungarians,
embracing, like flags,
the strange corner
of time
and space.
The building’s undulating dynamism – its three-dimensional, sculptural quality – its nature as a “Danube pebble”, embodies a handshake between Brutalist late modernism and organic architecture. In 2011, together with his co-designer Zoltán Miklós, Bence Vadász won the commission as first prize in a successful architectural competition. The process of development and final composition was preceded by countless sketches, colour and material studies, as well as architectural-historical research and analysis. Throughout the design process, they had to respond to the site, the space, the urban fabric, and the Danube. Bence Vadász recalls the nearly eight-year-long working process as follows:
“Eight years – hundreds of sketches – colour and material studies – architectural-historical research and analysis preceded the elaboration and the final composition.
How can one relate to the site – to the space – to the urban fabric – to the Danube?
And to the surroundings? To the neo-Renaissance rendered eclecticism of Imre Street – to Samu Pecz’s brick façade masterpiece, to the neo-Gothic Great Market Hall leaning towards Art Nouveau – to Ybl’s magnificent neo-Renaissance Central Customs House – or to the well-proportioned, routine brick buildings of the former warehouses – perhaps to the futuristic gesture of the ‘Bálna’ – or to Ernő Léstyán’s beloved and respected late-modern cubist brick composition?
To adapt? But to what, and how? In the base and the cornice? Perhaps in the use of materials? Yet everything is different, and each in a different way. Even within brick architecture alone, three distinct voices already speak on the square – a homogeneous, unarticulated, static clinker mass; a finely animated, majolica-adorned, colourfully vibrating dynamic composition; and a calmly routine, well-proportioned industrial building ensemble. Should it have a flat roof – modern – or an archaic pitched roof? As an acute-angled, trapezoidal corner infill, how should we behave – how should we ‘arrive’ at the square?
What kind of building should we construct?
Along long and winding paths, slowly and gradually, we arrived at the recognition – and, we hope, at the solution.”
Do Not Design a Building!
Let the mass be an organic “formation”: a body that appears to have “grown”, an undulating monolith. Not a house with doors, windows, a roof, and a base, but a sculptural spatial composition – a freely formed “Danube pebble” that can stand as an autonomous, almost free-standing sculpture within the square, entering into interaction through contrast with the various architectural voices of the urban spatial wall, eclectic in age, style, and proportion.
The realised and multiply award-winning building’s concrete bands, rippling one above the other as if driven by the wind, at times smooth out and “tame themselves” against Léstyán’s brick prism, while at other moments they lash out wildly like the crack of a whip. The spiritual antecedent of these waves lies in the unbridled form-making of Art Nouveau, yet they also constitute a restrained, twenty-first-century bow to Gaudí’s Casa Milà. Through its Secessionist references, the building responds to the architecture of the Great Market Hall, while something of the organic world of Mendelsohn’s observatory also shimmers through its materiality, wrapped in a Brutalist concrete “cipolla cloak”. Its rippling surface may even be read as a reflection of the Danube itself.
In 2019, the building was selected for inclusion among the exhibited works of the National Architectural Salon.
The Office Building of the National Assembly – Named after György Szabad (2016–2020), Kossuth Square
The shaping of the building constituted a sweeping task from the perspectives of design, organisation, composition, and architectural history alike.
Designing one of the nation’s most important public buildings in the “heart” of Budapest, on Kossuth Square, could only be the result of prolonged preparation, extensive architectural-historical research, and a long design process. Thus, over the course of four years, the “Janus-faced” building came into being – one that presents a historical neo-Baroque face towards Kossuth Square (constructed using twenty-first-century structures), “properly and beneficially” closing the southern spatial wall of the Nation’s Main Square, while at the same time, in its inner façades and interior spaces, representing a contemporary architecture with a distinctly individual voice, honestly revealing the era in which it was created. The realisation of the building is a narrative of seeking – and finding – the right proportional relationship between history, architectural history, and the creator’s ego. It marks an important milestone in Bence Vadász’s present-day architectural practice, as well as in the shaping of his human and moral stance. In 2016, he was granted the opportunity to close the south-western corner of the nation’s main square with a new building (or building wing), on the site of the former MTESZ Headquarters located at the corner of Kossuth Square.
In the first design phase, six modern variants were produced – six distinctive conceptual building studies – conceived as continuations of the realised Hültl House (Kossuth Square 9–10) and as “modern”, twenty-first-century envelopes drawn over the structural “skeleton” of Béla Pintér’s building.
1. A double-skin façade with stylised historic references and green walls.
2. A double-skin transparent façade in a late-modern (Bauhaus) spirit.
3. A double-skin façade with a perforated, graphic envelope.
4. A traditional stone façade created by sliding the grids of the two buildings over one another.
5. An organically undulating “whale body” formed by a vertical lamella system.
6. A louvred glass façade articulated by the silhouette of horizontal planar sections.
Each of these six responses could have offered a viable solution to the logical–historical–architectural “paradox” at hand. However, according to the structural expert assessment conducted at the time, the existing structure had deteriorated to such an extent and was so severely under-dimensioned that it could not be reused and had to be demolished. In parallel with this, a government resolution was adopted stating that the Kossuth Square façade originally outlined by Dezső Hültl was to be realised.
In the second design phase, Bence Vadász began to think in terms of “personal monument preservation”, historical (re)construction, architectural completion, conceptual reconstruction, and the completion of the spatial wall. As he wrote on one occasion: “I was searching for points of reference, because I sensed that this previously uncharted and dangerous ‘path’ might nevertheless lead to a solution that had so far remained hidden. We undertook historical and local historical research, and by coming to understand the history of the square’s formation and its enclosing walls, the eclectic face of the Nation’s Main Square gradually emerged – along with the work of Alajos Hauszmann (Curia, 1893–96) and Gyula Bukovics (Ministry of Agriculture, 1885–87), the unified wall line, and its relationship to the Parliament. The expectations of the historic environment thus became intelligible, both in front of and around the ‘main protagonist’ – the Parliament.”
He also examined the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Hültl House, uncovering numerous important contextual details, hidden messages, and contemporary external conditions that influenced the design process. “I came to understand the reasons put forward by the Public Works Council regarding the unified northern and southern spatial walls of Kossuth Square. It was an exciting question why Hültl chose the ‘imperial’ Neo-Baroque style as a means of strengthening the war-torn psyche of what had once been a ‘great nation’. We also uncovered the down-to-earth explanation for why only the northern spatial wall was completed in its entirety – in just a single year, in 1928, to designs by Béla Málnai – while the southern wall was realised in three phases. The reason was simple: the northern side existed as a single building plot, whereas the southern side consisted of three plots in three different ownerships. Consequently, the three building sections were constructed at entirely different times (1928, 1938, and 1972), by different designers, which explains the divergence in their structural systems and the architectural character of the inner courtyard façades. We likewise analysed separately the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of the house’s second construction phase in 1938: the external façade was realised according to Hültl’s sketches, while inside the two modernist designers composed a Bauhaus building.” Together with his architectural partners – the architects of Vadász Studio, UVATERV, and ZED Studio – the third design phase produced the model of the ‘Janus-faced house’ visible today. “The building, while serving as a respectful completion of a century-old idea, conceals small contemporary gestures through invisible modern structures, secret translucencies, references, and reflections within the external envelope, beneath and behind the majestic historical ‘bone shell’ – intended, in our conception, to carry the vibrant freshness of a twenty-first-century ‘fruit’. Perhaps these two worlds together, reinforcing one another, offer a harmonious image – as a calming closure to a hundred years of intense and eventful history.” On the basis of Dezső Hültl’s sketches, Bence Vadász and his fellow architects redesigned the Kossuth Square building with new structures, air cavities, fixings, ventilation, fire protection, and related systems. Adapting the façade to contemporary functions and complying with today’s stringent regulations, they repositioned every structural, insulation, thermal-bridge-breaking, ventilation, fire-protection, fixing, and related layer beneath the external skin. Particular attention was also paid to the “inclusion” of the metro exit. They composed and re-edited the “envisioned” Danube-facing façade, for which no original Hültl drawings or sketches had survived. The new roof structure and its mechanical, acoustic, and artistic superstructures were integrated into the mass in such a way that the newly designed load-bearing system had to be seated onto the remaining foundations of Béla Pintér’s demolished building. While the exterior of the building constitutes reconstruction and monument preservation, the contemporary architect was able to assert himself within the interior. In shaping the inner façades, a compositional principle emerged that may be described as a systematised losearchitectura, where barcode-like, dimensionally coordinated vertical slits (windows) set the architectural rhythm within solid surfaces. In the glass curtain walls, the inverse of this logic applies: the “shields” of solid surfaces carry forward the rhythmic formula, while on the steel frame structures the surfaces of green-wall elements close the vertical planes. As a fifth façade, visible from above, the geometrically arranged green plateaus of the inner courtyards transpose the same score onto horizontal surfaces. In this way, a concealed architectural world could be realised, one that through contrast reinforces both its own internal values and those of the historic external façade. The Janus-faced building thus presents a static exterior and a dynamic interior; a symmetrical exterior composition and an asymmetrical interior one; a historic stone façade on the outside and fibre-cement cladding within; an exterior that is calm, attuned to, and serving the architectural world of the square, and an interior that responds to the functional demands of the twenty-first century; an exterior that completes the spatial wall according to the foundational concept of 1927, and an interior that – following the example of the neighbouring building – articulates the spirit of our own time.
The “Non-Buildings”
Bence Vadász’s search for new paths did not end with buildings. Once stylistic boundaries had been crossed, generic boundaries opened up as well. Architecture is the essence of the arts. “Whether concealed or direct, quiet or emphatic, it contains within it the visual arts through sculptures, reliefs, or the sculptural quality of the building itself – painting through colour compositions – music, almost like a score, in façade hole-architecture – or poetry itself, through rhythm, emphasis, and rhyme…”
In this spirit, together with György Vadász and sculptor Pál Kő, he was able to create the three-dimensional, undulating gateway of the Budavári Koldus Kapu (Beggar’s Gate of Buda Castle, 1995), with forged ironwork by János Lehoczki, conceived as a pendant to the Hauszmann-designed Turul Habsburg Gate; as well as the symbolic system of their award-winning competition entry for the Hungarian 1956 Memorial in New York, an artwork expressing vulnerability, abandonment, and courage. The same approach underlies the pedestrian bridge planned for the Kopaszi Dam (2008), with its mast forest and “floating”, spatially undulating pier system evoking Mediterranean harbours; the cantilevered catenary curve of the fish-skeleton-like silhouette of the Bence Hill Lookout (2015 – co-designer Balázs Vadász); and the terrain-folded, “crested wave arc” of the Anna Meadow Chapel (2019).
It was in this way that the competition design for the New Danube Bridge at Lágymányos (2018) took shape, with its load-bearing structures forming a dynamic series of waves, their mutually reinforcing – or cancelling – Art Nouveau–leaning interferences; as well as the Memorial Well conceived for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which sought to incorporate the imprint of Reformed architectural traditions into its composition; and the competition proposal for the Holocaust Memorial in Zugló, whose abandoned, empty space conveys a symbolic message – the minimalist architecture of “absence”.
Beyond buildings, this same search for form – stepping into other dimensions – also finds its outcome in POETRY. “Like well-composed buildings, it has a scheme of rhymes, it has accents, it may have end rhymes, it has rhythm – and it conveys a message…”
EPIGRAM
“…for since you no longer caress me, you see, my ink line has gently fallen asleep upon the paper…”
[2020]