Text: György Szegő

Elemér Zalotay, an iconic architect in both Hungarian and international architecture, passed away on November 14th, 2020. He made thousands of designs for the future, but left only a few houses behind which are all excellent, and highly sculpturesque. Zalotay was a fervent believer of Modernism and disregarded architectural circumstances in Hungary heavily overburdened by politics. He was thinking in the framework of megstructures, which was integral with the trends of international architecture back in the 1960s and 70s, holding the promise of socially sensitive urbanistics to save the future. Zalotay chose to emmigrate in 1973, aged 41, but his megastructures conceived in Hungary preceeded structuralism evolving from the western traditions of literary history.