Subjective Makovecz Notes
The Subjective Makovecz Notes are the teaching aids of our Architect Mustra architecture camp. The publication was supported by the Imre Makovecz Foundation.
The book is available for purchase in Libri bookshops and the Writers' Shop; and can be ordered from Libri, Bookline and Anima online bookshops.
Imre Makovecz is undoubtedly the best documented Hungarian architect today, known both abroad and at home, whose oeuvre has both enriched and polarized the Hungarian architectural community. If we try to see the last hundred years, the period since the loss of the country at Trianon, as a cultural paradigm, all these images are organised around two works, Béla Bartók and Imre Makovecz. While Bartók's emigration and early death could only have an impact through his works, Imre Makovecz - although only ten years old when Bartók died - also frames Trianon as a cultural paradigm through his distinctive personality. The significance of Makovecz is most difficult to assess today. His pupils have perhaps only just begun to feel the absence of their master, suffering a kind of orphanhood that does not help them to reflect calmly. Nor can historians really relate, for they lack perspective, not to mention the fact that the oeuvre is perhaps still incomplete. While Imre Makovecz has risen to the top of the domestic architectural canon by having budgetary resources allocated to the maintenance of his oeuvre, this canon position is no longer a matter of the slightest clarity for the youngest generation. In the culture of the fading cohorts of Generation Y and the digital natives who follow in their wake, it is hard to say for sure, and the arguments of authority do not work. What fits on the screen of a smartphone, what fits in and out in fifteen seconds, is there. What is not: it is lost.
We were determined to bring Makoveczet close, to try to convey something of the rapture we all feel for his oeuvre. But we had no idea at first how to bridge the gap between the point-like, cloud-like and the long narratives, the big stories, which were already purely differences of form and size. We had in mind a kind of publication that is hierarchical, but also a network, one that seeks to convince not by the weight of words or the ceremoniality of statements, but by the number of references and the frequency of occurrences. We were looking for questions such as "What is a(z)...?", "What does it mean to...?", hoping that not only we, but also the reader interested in Imre Makovecz at a basic level, would ask: what does it mean to be organic, what is the drama of construction, what is a building camp, what is a village hall? The questions have been condensed into keywords, and it is therefore necessary to explain, in the form of an encyclopaedia article, what the terms and phrases that we regularly encounter when reading Imre Makovecz's writings mean.
The lexicon format has also given us enormous freedom. As a formally bound genre, as an almost overdetermined structure, it can be stopped and restarted at any time; it can be expanded and condensed at will. Such an undertaking can live on the smartphone as well as on the computer, it can be conceived in print as well as in electronic format. But most importantly, an encyclopaedia is not a temptation to read, but to be read into, and if it is even a little bit of a good job, it is not at all like this introduction: stale, boring and ignorant.
Andor Wesselényi-Garay
Beke Márton:
The "open house college", Community Development,
Civic Education
Nóra Fekete:
Anthroposophy, Department Stores, Concrete vs. wood, Convents,
Granica, Yin-yang, Double-centred spiral,
Kós Károly Association, Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA),
Country Building Journal, Triskell, Wandering School,
Visegrád Camps
Péter Haba:
Épületlény, Village Houses, Houses of Culture,
Residential Buildings, Holiday Homes, Educational Buildings,
Sports and leisure facilities, Symbols,
Churches, chapels, funeral homes
Csaba Masznyik:
Living architecture, Organics, Organic architecture
Smiló Dávid:
Ball without a mask, Budapest, Decoration, Lord of the Rings,
Minimal Space Competition, Movement Form Studies,
Contest, Flag, Seville World Expo
Foreword by Andor Wesselényi-Garay.
Concept:
Péter Pozsár,
Wesselényi-Garay Andor
Graphic design:
Szőke Gergely
Responsible publisher:
HELLO WOOD Kft.
Editor:
Nóra Fekete,
Kamilla Mihály
Proofreading:
Anita Farkas
Printing:
BPZines
Hello Wood Board:
András Huszár, Péter Pozsár, Dávid Ráday, Krisztián Tóth
Photos by Zsuzsa Darab
The publication was supported by the Makovecz Imre Foundation.