Collective Dreams and Bourgeois Villas – Site Plan of the Hungarian CIRPAC Group
Joint opening of the exhibition and the 2019 edition of Budapest100 entitled In the Footsteps of Bauhaus:
Greetings by:
István Rév, Director of the Blinken Open Society Archives
Bálint Kádár, President of the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre
In interwar Hungary, the CIRPAC group was one of the most important representatives of “Neues Bauen” [New building]. Farkas Molnár, József Fischer, and their associates, who were linked to Bauhaus and its mentality in several ways, ventured beyond the framework of architecture. Addressing social issues, they wrote publications and organized presentations and exhibitions—even if it meant confrontations with the authorities. Thus, besides architectural achievements, their site plan also presents the complex political conditions of the 1930s.
By presenting the history of the Hungarian CIRPAC group, the exhibition joins the discourse of recent years looking for relevant patterns in 20th-century history, which we can learn from today. Comparable to international tendencies, their activity is especially notable because as architects they took a stand on social issues beyond architecture. This even lead to confrontations with the authorities; the walls they ran into and the different routes they were forced to take outline the complex political conditions of the 1930s.
The 2019 edition of Budapest100 entitled In the Footsteps of Bauhaus is a partner event of the exhibition.