Text: Péter Mújdricza

Zalotay Elemér: A Margitszigeti Park ellenpólusa, 1995, Reprodukció: Hajdú József

Relying upon Le Corbusier and the arche-socialist Charles Fourier, Zalotay’s argument was so crystallized, clear and simple that it could not be reacted to anyway. Not even if it had occurred to someone that Jules Verne who had been so much sensitive to fantasies showed a kind of elementary revulsion of the utopias of cities with giant ribbon houses several kilometres long that represent ’mechanical alienation’.
Lacking childhood memories of Verne, one could imagine a more threatening windstorm, which would create an unbroken surface of a windsail of appr. 500,000 square metres in case of a ribbon house with parameters parallel with the River Danube! What happens where a hurricane strikes such a vast surface when racing at a speed of several hundred kilometres per hour? Or, by calculating the conditions prevailing during the time of the cold war – that is the 1960s and 70s –, this question could also be asked: would a single mega-target point or one lot lower with more modest dimensions offer more effective protection for survival against a land-to-land rocket attack? Throughout the ages the form of towns and cities has been basically defined by the aspects of defensibility even if it is illusory by its nature since the deployability of H-bombs. However, this illusion was born back in the fulfilment of Leonardo’s dream of flying. The human flight which is at least as problematic as it would be for fish to change their medium to conquer the land. In biology the term ’runback’ is used for the self-threatening phenomenon that we experience with the proliferation of technology going beyond every limit with an almost religious ecstasy and which is threatening with the extinction of mankind right now. To launch an attack against the skies, the celestials with towers and flying Babels. And the sobriety of the late modern age and its disillusionment with the drug of technology used as a substitute for religion has also come. As Paul Virilio argued: every new technical invention is also a new accident, meaning the „invention” of a new Golem each time.