Exhibition and Book Show on Cubic Houses
Architects’ House, 03. 12. 2022 – 05. 01. 2022

Text: Melinda Harlov-Csortán

The research workshop named Spatial Forms – Society Forms research workshop organises an exhibition for the fourth time in the headquarters of the Association of Hungarian Architects. These exhibitions have always been based on results of a new research project with a cast, and have been published in a volume of studies. Topics of former exhibitions ranged from surveying parallels of the cityscapes of Vienna and Budapest in the 20th century to the roles of social engineers. These events are interconnected by interdisciplinary questions from curator and editor Máté Tamáska architect-sociologist. Opened in December, 2021 the exhibition is titled Cube House, the Typology of 20th century rural architecture. Live Worlds of „Existing Socialism”. The apropos of the project is the photo collection in the National Archives which the curator made special mention of. The Patriotic People’s Front published a contest in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of the country’s „liberation” to phogrographically record the settlements of the country as the examples of the successful development of the previous four decades. As anyone could submit photographs for this purpose, the collection contains representations of highly different qualities and topics. However, due to unspecified reasons, they have never been exhibited. Lecturers invited to this exhibition opening have defined several possible explanations themselves, such as the recorded conditions did not reflect the ideology propagated, or that it was no longer a centrally assigned task to celebrate the past four decades when the photos were collected. This year, however, a total of twenty exhibitions have been organised based on this photo stock all over the country, covering partly different topics, presenting certain aspects of the visual archives of the so-called existing socialism.