György Csete, Ildikó Csete and the Pécs Group

Text: András Hadik
Photos: Zsófia Nyirkos / Kunsthalle Budapest

The exhibition presents the works of György Csete (1937–2016), one of the founding fathers of Hungarian organic architecture, and his wife, the textile artist Ildikó Csete (1940–2018), together with the works of the Pécs Youth Office from the 1970s, an architectural association led by György Csete that operated between 1970 and 1976 and was later known as the Pécs Group. Csete derived the Hungarian organic architecture from the Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture, which emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. His primary goal was to design architecture in his native language, in contrast to the technicistic desolation of international modernism, which was still prominent in the 1970s. His oeuvre advocated for the restoration of the now-lost unity of nature, architecture, and man, the cessation of industrial environmental degradation and energy waste, and the use of solar energy.