The Architect of Sensitive Modernism

Text: Miklós Sulyok

Gábor Turányi, an outstanding master of contemporary Hungarian architecture, graduated in the mid-1970s from the Technical University of Budapest, where the already empty trends of Modernist architecture and the strict budgetary measures of “Socialism” radically limited the potentials of architecture in Hungary. From the very start of his career, he was able to think synchronically with contemporary European architecture, sensing the issues of modern architecture much in the same way as his fellow architects did in the West, and typically finding similar solutions as they had. Sailing in the wake of modern architecture, which some theoreticians argue is the Post-Modernist trend, the second stage of Modernism, he evolved into being the most outstanding representative of this style, which he interpreted as the culmination and perfection of Modernist architecture. As opposed to the so-called „non-narrative”, technicist, impersonal architecture, Gábor Turányi soon became a master of a unique type of localized, sensitive, regionalist Modernist architecture, which is a historic achievement in the history of Hungarian architecture.