Selected Writings of János Gerle

Text: Attila Turi

With the support of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, the Association of Hungarian Architects has published a volume of writings titled Healing Architecture written by János Gerle (1947‒2012), architect and writer, who died ten years ago. Its size, format and paper binding suggest a book easy to turn, but this is only the appearance. Here is a volume, ten years after his death, about the writer (specialist writer) who wrote so much about architects and architecture. Now he is the protagonist, the one who always remained quietly in the background, researching, organising and summarising with impressive diligence. The book reveals Gerle’s sensitive mindset, a symptomic approach to the problems of our built and natural environment, which reveals the forces behind phenomena, their systems and the impulses that influence them, and provides a way of looking at them.
A most useful reading, written in an accessible language. Deep context is presented in a way that can be read in a variety of layers. A spirit that Gerle saw in the turn of the century, and which he saw living on in organic architecture and its approach, returns again and again in his writings. Since 1983, he had been a free thinker, not only ideologically, but existentially: this also shows his deep commitment to Hungarian and universal culture, to healing architecture.