Post-war Hungary may seem the ideal place to develop a critical theory of capitalist society: the work of Georg (György) Lukács, the internationally acclaimed Hungarian philosopher whose 1923 book,
As in other state-socialist countries, architectural debates in Hungary between 1960 and 1990 displayed conflicting lines of thought. Critical theory was indeed possible in state-socialist Hungary, and it gave rise to the development of two characteristic positions: insistence on the ‘specificity’ of architecture, on the one hand, and the critique of ‘étatist’ planning, on the other. Both largely developed on a neo-Marxist or a post-Marxist basis. Therefore, the critique of a system that claimed the Marxian tradition for itself meant rejecting a monolithic ‘critical theory’, analyzing the objectivations, institutions and practices of state-socialist society.
Post-war Hungary may seem the ideal place to develop a critical theory of capitalist society: the work of Georg (György) Lukács, the internationally acclaimed Hungarian philosopher whose 1923 book,
As in other state-socialist countries, architectural debates in Hungary between 1960 and 1990 displayed conflicting lines of thought. Typically, these conflicting tendencies each claimed a Marxist lineage for themselves, and their positions regarding architecture and planning were different. However, how firmly this critical theory was rooted in the ‘real’ Marxian tradition is hotly debated, as is the question of what constitutes orthodox Marxism. Although the debate, as we will see, was well-informed and critical, references to Western neo-Marxist thinkers, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Manfredo Tafuri or Fredric Jameson, were conspicuously absent — as were references to Lukács himself.
In Hungary during the decades immediately after World War II, Marxism as official state philosophy became a rather ossified, schematic teaching that was present in statements of a few philosophers and intellectuals in key Party positions but that could hardly reach society at large. Ironically, it was the Hungarian uprising in 1956 that forced intellectuals to address the question of a critical, Marxist analysis of the social situation — something the ruling regime desperately wanted to avoid. A younger generation emerged, unburdened by the repressive atmosphere of the early 1950s. They were more inspired by the writings of Western, mostly French, Marxists such as Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre and André Gorz than by texts written in state-socialist countries. They maintained ties to their counterparts in the East and West. The most important areas of this ‘Marxist renaissance’ were critical sociology, economic theory, aesthetics, film and literary theory.
In the Hungarian context, the most important driving force of a Marxist renaissance, Georg Lukács, was a controversial figure in the Communist Party. Around 1950, his theories of class struggle and democracy had been criticized as revisionist. After 1956 he was even arrested because of his support for the upheaval. He was able to rejoin the Party in 1967, as the earlier attacks by the Party had slowly ebbed, and a group of young philosophers, called the ‘Lukács school’ or ‘Budapest school’, gathered around him, working mainly in the fields of Marxist ethics and aesthetics. Among architects, however, his authority was badly damaged, mainly because of his earlier, prominent role in the introduction of socialist realism, and his critical exchange with the architect and theorist Máté Major, who was widely respected by his colleagues.
Máté Major, a former CIAM member turned Marxist academician, played a key role in the network of East-West exchanges in Hungary during the Cold War period. Major was the chair of the architectural history department (later the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture) at the Technical University Budapest, and head of the editorial board of the journal of the Union of Hungarian Architects,
Six monographs published in the
In 1933, when Major joined CIAM, he also became a member of the Hungarian Communist Party, which was then an illegal organization. He was picked up in Budapest by Russian soldiers in January 1945, in the final days of World War II, and taken to the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war. It took his Party comrades almost a year to effect his release and enable him to return to Budapest (
After the successful Communist seizure of power in 1949, with the successive elimination of all political opponents (known as ‘salami tactics’), Major established himself as the key expert of post-war architectural reconstruction. However, by 1951 there could be no doubt that architectural reconstruction in Hungary meant Soviet-style socialist realism. This posed something of a problem, given that Major had consistently criticized the ‘formalism’ of socialist realism in his articles published between 1949 and 1951. József Révai, the minister of culture and the main ideologist of the Party, masterminded an elaborate and interesting plot. Architect and urban theorist Imre Perényi, who grew up and studied architecture in the Soviet Union before the World War and returned to Hungary in 1945, was commissioned to set off a debate with his article ‘Western Decadent Tendency in Contemporary Architecture’ (
Perényi accused the international, ‘cosmopolitan’ style of being a tool for imperialist states to infiltrate socialist culture, and called for a relentless struggle against such attempts. Major, the next speaker, began by outlining scientific and technological developments after the industrial revolution and their consequences for the urbanization process. He argued for the rational analysis of human needs, and rejected any concealment that would hide the eloquent face of architecture, which was to reflect the purpose of the building. ‘Real architecture finds the most appropriate, most aesthetic proportions, slight refinements to the scientifically resolved task, that increase the usability of the object — i.e. the building — to perfection’ (
In his first contribution to the Big Debate, Lukács accused Major of equating aesthetic quality with functionality. This false equation proved that Major could not distance himself from Western bourgeois decadence, claimed Lukács:
Everybody stayed at horribly ugly hotels, with excellent rooms. I know many beautiful old houses that cannot be inhabited the way we wish. It is the specificity of the aesthetic that it surpasses the mere conceptual fullness and correctness of the content. … A good poem has an aesthetic surplus over the mere content. We are making incorrect judgements in questions of architecture if we disregard this aesthetic surplus — as Major does, influenced by Western decadence. (
Major responded that Lukács failed to recognize the specificity of architecture as a consequence of its embeddedness in the conditions of production. He criticized the philosopher’s separating the functional and aesthetic sides of architecture instead of pointing out the dialectical relationship between them. It was unworthy of a Marxist to investigate and explain phenomena while disregarding their ontological differences: ‘Comrade Lukács — not unlike the creators of the Neue Sachlichkeit — lumps architecture together with painting and sculpture, and I assume that he judges them all from the position of literature’ (
Révai, the Party’s chief ideologist, rejected Major’s genealogy of modern architecture, arguing that he falsely traced its origins back to the Industrial Revolution, rather than to the crisis of capitalism after World War I and the defeat of the workers’ revolutions. Modern architecture in the service of the people is a false claim, Révai stressed: at best, it is a decadent luxury for the well-to-do, and a reformist utopia for the masses. He also criticized Major’s rejection of the architectural forms of previous ruling classes:
It is wrong that the architecture of class societies solely demonstrates the power and hegemony of the ruling class …, it can express certain progressive aims of those societies as well. It can develop forms that are not tied to the ruling class of a society, but survive it to serve the needs of the ones following it. (
Révai did not advocate copying forms from the past, or Soviet models — rather, it was the task of the architects to find out how to use such precedents, and how to avoid mistakes made by Soviet architects in the early phase of their pioneering work.
According to the account of the architectural historian János Bonta, who attended the event, Révai’s well-argued speech convinced many in the audience (
It is not the task of this book to answer all important theoretical questions. The architecture of capitalism is still developing and produces results which can be used in the further investigation of the concepts of design. The precise definition and the correct assessment of those achievements of the new architecture of capitalism, that serve the future, will be the task of future research. (Major 1984: 464)
For readers in Hungary, and East-Central Europe in general, this volume was one of the first available sources on the history of modern architecture. For the reviewer of
In 1967, Akadémiai Kiadó, the publisher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, published a small booklet by Major in the series Korunk tudománya [Science of our time], with the title
Máté Major,
It is the unresolved contradiction of form and function that moves architecture forward, emphasized Major. He regarded the Unité d’habitation as a building of high quality, fulfilling material, functional and cultural demands. He detected, however, an unresolved contradiction between future-oriented mass production technologies that were open and flexible and the ‘closed’ system used by Le Corbusier in Marseille. But the gravest of contradictions, according to him, could be seen in the countries building socialism in the decades after 1930. It was based on a misunderstanding of the essence of modern architecture. Ideologizing the lack of an industrial infrastructure to realize modern constructions, it was erroneously assumed that the art and architecture of socialism could be realized immediately, before economic-social transformation, and so had to differ from capitalist art and architecture. Therefore, modern architecture had to be rejected in the fifties as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘decadent’, and classicist and Renaissance forms had to be used in what was called the ‘progressive tradition’. This false theory, stated Major, produced worse buildings than ever before: while old architecture was able to express its age, Stalinist architecture only showed that big mistakes could be made in the name of Marxism, if the specificity of architecture remained unrecognized. He criticized socialist realism as the main example of this contradiction. However, he carefully avoided the term socialist realism, using ‘New Archaism’ and ‘New Eclecticism’ instead. The false form of these buildings distorted their content. Behind the palatial facades of the blocks were hidden small and poorly equipped flats, denying the ideal of equality of citizens and hindering the development of the forces of production, of materials, of construction and the technologies necessary to fulfil the demands of mass housing — a basic goal of a socialist society.
In this essay, Major’s intention to counter Lukács’s arguments in the Big Debate is quite clear; the title of his book,
In the year that Major’s book
Covers of the two-volume anthology
Lukács’s essay, originally written for the popular literary review
This is the eve of a Marxist renaissance in the socialist world. The re-birth is not only aiming at the correction of the distortions under Stalin, but first of all at grasping the new facts of reality using the old-new methods of Marxism. Certainly, to continue what was called Socialist Realism in the Stalinist period would be hopeless. But I believe those who want to bury Socialist Realism are wrong … and Solzenitsyn’s novel is showing us the way. (
Béla Köpeczi, in his introduction to the anthology, underlined Lukács’s concept of humanism as a political strategy to attract bourgeois humanists who did not accept socialism, but who were ready to fight against fascism. Lukács was indeed the first protagonist of a ‘Marxist humanism’, having already written his
Marxist humanism as a programme was embraced by the critical opposition in Hungary. The ruling elite in state-socialist countries considered Marxism a ‘world view’ that made it possible to observe and explain reality by using a certain set of principles. This contemplative Marxism had no use for social criticism. To begin a discourse criticizing this state of affairs, one had to be very careful and avoid any direct confrontation with the system. The early work of Marx, first discovered in the 1930s, proved very useful in developing the tools and language of this criticism. Based on these early texts, an image of Marx as a ‘humanist philosopher’ had been constructed, in contrast with earlier interpretations. The protagonists of Marxist humanism regarded safeguarding social peace and avoiding an open confrontation with the communist regime to be necessary preconditions for their critical discourse (
Since the 1950s, Lukács’s ideas had been centred around the problem of everyday life, which had to be understood ontologically. Another important philosopher in this respect was Ágnes Heller, a member of the Lukács school who was also influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre. For Heller, humanism meant opposition to a ruling Party apparatus interested only in maintaining its privileges. She argued against determinism and for a Marxist ethics based on the relative autonomy of human action: ‘when the individual chooses between alternatives and places the imprint of his own individuality on the fact of choosing … he is exercising autonomy’. Being able to choose among different options is the precondition of freedom (
Opening, openness, humanizing: these were catchwords not only for critical Marxist voices, but also — for different reasons — for critical voices in architecture, eagerly taken up by Team 10 architects. Jaap Bakema spoke of the ‘open society’ as a notion able to absorb a range of different meanings, an approach free of ideological constraints. The Polish architect Oskar Hansen advocated ‘open form’, and Alison and Peter Smithson used the term ‘open society’ explicitly in connection with their Berlin Hauptstadt competition project in 1957–58. In architecture, the call for ‘re-humanizing’ was meant to envision other modernisms and to resuscitate neglected community life in the big city (
In the same year, 1962, a large part of the fourth issue of
An interesting document regarding the ‘re-humanization’ of architecture was the small, well-designed book by Pál Granasztói and Károly Polónyi,
In his autobiography, Polónyi remembered that his career as a designer in Hungary came to a halt when a Communist Party official made it clear to him that without Party membership, he had no chance of landing larger commissions (
Meanwhile, in Hungary, other intellectual fields contributed to the discussions on architecture and urban planning. In Hungary, sociology and social philosophy were the fields where theorists of the Marxist renaissance attracted a wide audience. Monthly journals such as
It is the task of sociology to analyze the alienation process of society, to show its causes and to contribute to its elimination or at least to its mitigation. It is therefore not the task of sociology to optimize the functioning of the state apparatus, but to serve the humanization of social conditions. (Vázsonyi 2004: 38)
Many critical sociologists focused their research on the urbanization process and the agricultural village, as well as the development and problems of the socialist-realist new town, Dunaújváros, the theme of a book by Miklós Miskolczi (
György Konrád was one of the intellectuals who gained attention by conducting social research and casting the results in literary form. He studied literature and sociology at Budapest University in the years before the uprising of 1956. From 1959 on, he worked for seven years as a children’s welfare supervisor in Budapest’s 7th district. His experience with poverty and social decay served as the basis for his novel
[The] housing shortage is now the most neuralgic point of tension of our social life. Families who would be ready to pay a large part of their income for better living conditions, but who are unable to fit into the rigid financing schemes, will despair and this desperation can trigger many social problems and disorganization. Work ethics decline, the stability of families is endangered, and the inequality in terms of the education of children rises. (
In conclusion, Szelényi and Konrád urged for a more differentiated system of housing production, financing and distribution.
In the 1970s the political horizon darkened, particularly for Marxists in the opposition. With Lukács’s death in June 1971, the last obstacle to disciplining rebellious Marxists had been removed. After formulating the new Party position in May 1973, key figures of the Marxist opposition were removed from state research institutes. Their options were either to surrender or to accept marginalization. Accordingly, this group split in two: one group, which included Konrád and Szelényi, left the country, accepting scholarships or faculty positions at Western universities. The others withdrew from political life, taking up an apolitical rather than oppositional stance, insisting on ‘pure theory’ and accepting the rules of the game. Later, they formed the so-called ‘democratic opposition’ that rose into political power after the fall of state socialism. Polónyi noted, ‘At the same time I also felt I had to go, because the reform movement changed to empty rhetoric. So I returned to Africa’ (
Szelényi and Konrád wrote their next book,
The claim of the authors that workers were powerless and that they were the most underprivileged class in Socialist Hungary was unacceptable to the Communist Party. Many of the criticized middle-class ‘intellectuals’ rejected it as well, since they felt weak and deprived of power. However, as the former ruling elite of Party bureaucrats began to erode, a new role in shaping a future society was clearly on the horizon for critical intellectuals, raising questions of their ideological commitment. By the 1980s, the gap was widening between bureaucrats, whose days were numbered, and a well-educated intelligentsia as the leading force of social transformation.
At this time, the positions of our protagonists were taking on new connotations in the political force field. Major, particularly because of his attacks against postmodernism, which were spreading quickly among architects and architectural students, was regarded increasingly as a figure of the old Party nomenklatura, unable to distance himself from academic Marxism. Konrád and Szelényi, while still in Hungary, were part of the ‘democratic opposition’ emerging from the camp of the Marxist renaissance. They were marginalized intellectuals and therefore able to articulate the interests of the workers. They regarded Polónyi, who never considered himself a Marxist, as part of the technobureaucratic elite ‘on the road to class power’, disconnected from the direct producers.
Polónyi described planning in his autobiographical texts as an ‘opportunistic profession: you have to take the opportunity’, and characterized the planner as a sailor ‘who should sail with the wind, instead of trying to alter the wind’ (
I have a horror when my very nice colleagues … with good intention, were standing on these models … and said ‘fifty thousand people on this estate, the tubes here and there’: they acted as the Gods. I felt that this superiority is just a kind of abuse. (
However, he and Szelényi expected that the unfolding of étatism would eventually lead to the formation of a civil society able to articulate and handle conflicts.
In 1971–72, Oswald Mathias Ungers invited Jaap Bakema, Shadrach Woods, Reima Pietilä, Charles Polónyi and Alison and Peter Smithson to Cornell University to participate in his Team 10 seminar. Polónyi recalled that Szelényi, who was teaching at the time at Cornell, invited him:
to work with him on the field of social criticism. But at that time, I was working on another problem: in five years, we had to build as many houses as we could. Because another social fact was that back then many apartments were occupied by 2–3 families, without sewerage, without water. So, I was much more interested in using the available means as effectively as possible. So, at that time I did not agree with their criticism. I considered it an intellectual criticism that was based more on foreign literature than on real problems. (
The gap between Polónyi’s pragmatic orientation and Konrád’s critique is evident in their ways of handling the high demands that mass production put on architecture in Hungary, increasingly turning it into a technical and scientific discipline by the late 1960s. The first issue of
Konrád considered such ‘étatist’ strategies as tools of oppression:
We believed that the big estates were perfect tools to make the people more apathetic, to transform them into some kind of machines. And the system to distribute them as some kind of premium, where people got their apartment as a present, was not good. It made the people like children. It was the self-confidence of the industrial vision of the scientific, technological revolution, and this whole futuristic rhetoric, and it was generally related to a socialist planification system in the East and capitalistic progress in the West. We wanted somehow to avoid the violation of city life and of the organic growth of cities. It was a period in which we wanted to show what people really wanted. The message was: please don’t intervene so much. Less state, more society. Less planification [sic], more surprising and unpredictable city life. Less rigid rationalism, more communication. Sensual communication: people should have all kind of opportunities to come together. (
In an essay published in the popular social-science review,
How should we proceed? It is obvious that the étatist planned economy must be maintained. Not only in socialist countries, where the conditions characteristic of capitalism no longer exist and cannot be restored, but even under capitalist conditions. Urban design has acquired a regional and national scale, and because the Earth’s resources are limited and shared, after all, the scale of urban design must be extended to encompass the whole Earth, turning it into an orbistic surface. This will only be possible through state and even international institutions, using instruments of state control. (
However, the ‘étatist elite’ cannot take responsibility for all manifestations of life; decisions on a range from the local to national scale have to be taken at the appropriate level. Polónyi warns against leaving such decisions to the market, as this would result in segregation: ‘This would exclude huge masses from the possibility of having an apartment, since the banks only give credit to those who belong in one way or the other to the prosperous’ (
This statement and the notion of an ‘étatist elite’ closely reflected Polónyi’s own view of himself; he was critical towards both the Party state and market capitalism: ‘Our aim was to use the opportunity. If we had not used the opportunity, one quarter of the population would now live in slums’.
In the 1980s, as the cultural climate turned milder again, the tension between fractions of the opposition grew. Polónyi’s earlier concerns about the touristic development of Lake Balaton were transformed into an ecological issue. Triggered by a project to build a dam on the Danube, environmental protection became a central issue around which a large part of the opposition rallied. In 1983, Polónyi started a series of international summer schools (the International Workshop Seminars) on Lake Balaton and on the Danube, where his Team 10 friends Alison and Peter Smithson were regular guests (Figure
Publications of the International Workshop Seminars organized by Károly Polónyi in Hungary between 1983 and 1992. Reproduction by the author.
Polónyi invited Imre Makovecz, probably the sole postmodern architect from a state-socialist country with recognition in the West, and the protagonist of an ‘organic’ architecture that expressed national identity, to the first two workshop seminars. Makovecz’s open criticism of Marxism, state socialism and its system of planning contributed to his international reputation as a voice of the opposition, but this did not hinder some large commissions that came mostly from local authorities at this time. While ‘new’ representatives of the Marxist renaissance, such as Szelényi, criticized the large housing estates from the perspective of the political left, Makovecz’s criticism came from the opposite direction. No wonder that this triggered the ire of the ‘old’ Marxist architect-turned-academic Máté Major, who felt reminded of the period of the Big Debate and the arguments for introducing socialist realism. He published a series of articles criticizing postmodern architecture in general, and Imre Makovecz and his followers in particular. ‘We have the Hungarian postmodernists who intend to concoct a new architecture out of Hungarian folk and art nouveau architecture. … Postmodernism has infected the University, the design offices, and even the Union of Hungarian Architects’, he complained (
After the collapse of state socialism in 1989, ‘non-aligned’ intellectuals such as Polónyi were seen as potential candidates for positions in city governments. They were supported by the party Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége, SZDSZ), which included many former neo-Marxists from the ‘democratic opposition’. Ironically, it was precisely the fall of communism, the opening of the borders and the extension of the EU that lessened the intensity and significance of East-West encounters. Expo ’95, with the title ‘Bridges into the Future’, which was to be organized jointly by Vienna and Budapest, was abandoned in 1991, two years after the collapse of state-socialism: first the Viennese voted against it, then Budapest followed suit. When Polónyi organized a summer school on Lake Balaton in 1992, he and his Team 10 guests reminisced about the 1950s with nostalgia. When Polónyi, once the ‘King of the Southern Shore’, returned to his empire, he saw that it had been destroyed by new commercial development. In Alison Smithson’s elegiac words:
We have to come to the point where buildings are not always the answer to our wellbeing … so perhaps we should look again at the European Virgilian dream … which, in some way, is where Lake Balaton started in the 1950s and why Team 10 liked Pologni’s [sic] sense of a socialist leisure served by discrete, simple seeming structures standing among untouched trees in a still Virgilian landscape; service structures put down with a light touch so that the lake area of Balaton could continue a little longer its dreamy life. (
Reminiscing about the time of her childhood, when the world was still a safe place, she concluded, along with a diagram (Figure
Drawing by Alison Smithson, lyrics by Sue Dunbar, from the publication
Our cities — our countries even — can no longer be assumed safe. This seems to me to make it all the more important that at least some leisure places should continue to turn away from materialistic, heedlessly commercial, pressures and offer, with a fresh authenticity of form, an idea of the Virgilian Dream in the idyllic setting of Lake Balaton. (
Returning to the issues raised in the introduction, it seems to me that critical theory was indeed possible in state-socialist Hungary. It clearly had effects on architectural theory, and was a major impetus in the development of two characteristic positions: the insistence on the ‘specificity’ of architecture, on the one hand, and the critique of ‘étatist’ planning, on the other. Both largely developed from a critical analysis of the given societal conditions, without ideological influences from the likes of Jameson or Tafuri. Since the ruling ideology of Marxism-Leninism blocked all serious discourse on society, truly ‘critical’ theories were developed on a neo-Marxist or a post-Marxist basis (excluding non-Marxist social critique). Therefore, the critique of a system that claimed the Marxian tradition for itself meant the rejection of a monolithic ‘critical theory’ as well as the emergence of critical theorists who took on the task of analyzing the objectivations, institutions and practices of state-socialist society.
The author has no competing interests to declare.