120 years of the Association of Hungarian Architects

Text: Tamás Ulrich

The history of the professional organization founded in the summer of 1902 on the initiative of Ödön Lechner as the Association of Hungarian Architects is described in a unique way in the jubilee publication prepared for the 120th anniversary, the excellent work of editors Eszter Götz, Bálint Botzheim and György Szegő. The editorial concept, divided into 10-year periods, recalls the events related to the history of the Association with the help of selected period documents. With a short editorial introduction per chapter, with the communication of numerous original articles or historical documents published in the Magyar Építőművészet magazine founded at the same time or in the trade press. The authors of these quoted writings are usually the well-known architects of the given period, in many cases the president of the Association himself, or a prominent member of the presidency, or well-known architects of the time. Reading the old documents, one has the feeling that the text was written today about the current problems of architecture and architects, only the language and the date help to recognize the temporality. The completed volume contains an enormous amount of contemporary documents, photographs and thus knowledge material, browsing through which will give those interested a lot of experience.