The history of modern art has its share of icons, and the Bauhaus in particular is considered a reliable supplier of great achievements between the wars. Undoubtedly one of them was the design for a single-family house by Farkas Molnár (1897–1945), famously titled the Red Cube, which was planned for the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 but then remained in the design stage. The focus of most commentators has rarely been on how the building can be analysed and situated in detail, however, since it is its iconic look that has draw most of the attention. The colour and forms of the designs are reminiscent of the latest creations in painting in the early 1920s, which circulated across Europe, especially in the Soviet Union and the Netherlands. This entails the discussion of Constructivism, which also had an impact on architecture. In the first years of the Bauhaus, the utopian and rational character of art in the machine age was thus negotiated, but at the same time, for many artists, including Farkas Molnár, the human being remained the measure of all things.[1]
Tag: modernist architecture
Artwork of the Month, July 2023: The Napraforgó Street Housing Colony (1931)
In the Budapest suburb of Pasarét, just some 400 metres away from the church of St. Anthony’s, discussed in an earlier article in this blog, is a quiet residential street of villas built in the early 1930s. This unassuming road, Napraforgó utca (Sunflower Street), occupies an important place in the history of interwar architecture and urban thought in Hungary, for it was an experiment in the uses of modernist design in addressing the acute housing problems of the post-war city. Somewhat neglected in the decades after the Second World War, it was declared a national historic monument in 1999, and in the last ten years or so it has become a subject of particular interest due to its putative association with the Bauhaus.[1] The title alone of the Napraforgó Street Bauhaus Association (Napraforgó Utcai Bauhaus Egyesület), set up in 2017, indicates the importance given to this connection. On the occasion of the 2019 Bauhaus centenary, the Association organised walking tours and an open-air exhibition in the street.
New book: Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design
Artwork of the Month, August 2022: The American House by Berty and Fanuška Ženatý (1928)
Built in 1928 on one of the slopes of Zlín’s hilly and quite bare landscape, the family home of Berty and Fanuška Ženatý became known as The American House. It was a replica of a house that the couple owned in the United States, where they had lived and worked for a few years. The villa was rebuilt in the new location upon the wish of the manufacturer Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) for whom it was meant to serve as a model house that could be easily replicated for the employees of his factories.
Artwork of the Month, February 2022: The House of Jakub Deml by Bohuslav Fuchs (1921–22)
In the western outskirts of the provincial Moravian town of Tasov lies a picturesque three-storey house, set back from the road and distinguished from the surrounding buildings on a separate plot of land surrounded on all sides by greenery. It is not a very remarkable house, but it is noticeable because it is in a slightly elevated position and because the rest of the lane where it is situated is populated by modest single-storey cottages. Further enquiry reveals that it is the former house of the poet and writer Jakub Deml (1878–1961). Built in 1921–22, it is listed by the National Monument Institute as a protected cultural monument (registry no. ÚSKP 15415/7-3089). The house is listed, one assumes, less because of the significance of the design and rather more because its owner was one of the most prominent Czech authors of the first half of the twentieth century.