“The way it started (1996) was that we came up with a novel idea together with community developers with whom we had been working for several years in other Hungarian settlements. The idea was to make so-called street maps of towns, to get to know not only their structure, not only their architecture, but also their human aspect and the composition of their population. Makó was already a very complex town. It used to have a much more important role in the region than Szeged, it was sort of the county capital, but that changed later. We walked every street, we made a survey of every house, the pavement in front of the houses, the utilities, the overall picture, which defines what it means to you when you walk through the streets of a small town. The locals don’t always notice that there are overhead cables bursting in front of their houses, that there are no sewer connections, that the ditches haven’t been cleaned, while they live in beautiful, dignified farmhouses typical of the Great Plain region, with well-kept facades. So we captured all that in a hundred-page document that is a little bit architectural, a little bit social and a little bit spiritual in scope. Our work began, so to speak, with the delivery of this booklet there in Makó.”

(Imre Makovecz)

Drawings

Designs

Photos