When practicing my vocation, the consecrated world of plants, especially trees, have always inspired me to let their “word” be heard inside my walls.
The vitality of its dynamics, its flexibility, tied to a place yet resistant to storms, the protecting embrace of its shade, the fragrant scent of its blossoms offering themselves up to the skies, its “song”, is the fairy-adviser of my architecture. I say fairy for I have missed them that have left this earthly space, and would like to bring them closer to us.
(Mihály Babits)
The eyes looking out from the “poplars” embracing the church towers give shape to the soul that has made the trees its home. The chiming of the bells issues from these window-eyes. The towers are of glued structures. Their range of motion in the wind is possible to the extent the structures will allow, approximately 1.5 m. at the peak. The towers with the chiming eyes encircled by the poplars swaying in the wind summon all living things to make an offering. This was the aim of the church at Siófok, as well as the towers of the churches in Temesvár [Timişoara, Romania] and Sepsiszentgyörgy [Sfantu Gheorghe, Romania].
The concave spine and ribs of the nave conjure up the interior of the chest, the lungs and the heart, the place of breathing, of the soul, the place from which the soul begins its journey before the offering is made.
I know that this description is unacceptable, overly poetic, bombastic and empty for the new “streamlined”, “modern” tastes. So be it.
Yet I feel that without the redemption and love of nature — including the nature of man — there is no path to the Creator. Architects must take this step, the spiritualization of nature. It will not suffice to think that an empty white square, on the other side of nothingness, is the home of spirituality.
…
A number of people have asked me to draw for them King Attila’s palace. Although it must have been made of earth, wood and tents, and I even have some notion about the architecture of the Manicheans, the early Christians, the late Romans and the Celts, I didn’t feel like creating a fictitious eclecticism. All that ill-advised reconstruction and the even more ill-advised romanticism made me flinch.
Influenced by Blossfeldt, Plato, Steiner and Maróti, the “Atlantis” drawings made me enter a “still-extant” bygone world, the vision of a former, younger Earth. I am enthralled by the admixture of the magic of folk art, of Böcklin, Kleist and Bartók I find around me, the plant creature, the living, intelligent houses, the relativity of gravity, the cosmic essence
of symbols, the expulsion of the fallen angels.
King Attila’s palace is a haystack shaped dome hovering above the balance of light and dark. His throne consists of four chairs positioned in four directions, with a different winged being standing behind each. These beings also exist upside down in the well behind the throne. Their alter-ego lives in that other world. Above the net woven from one of
the symbols of folk art is its spatial origin — dark and light revolving on a globe. The rock roots of the palace float atop this.
Attila’s palace is a celestial palace, like the palace of the water fairies, re. the Golden Garden — Csallóköz (Zitny ostrov, Slovakia) gleams forth from the Danube’s depths.
Attila is lord of the sky and the earth, the upper world and lower world; he publishes forth the truth toward the four corners of the earth.
