Kunsthalle, Budapest, 4-30 October 2017

Dr. Peter Magyar is a Hungarian architect living in the United States of America. He left Hungary in 1975 and moved to the US in 1980. Since then he has continuously been teaching architecture at American universities. Alongside to university teaching and research he has been actively involved in architectural design at all stages of his life. He has contributed to constructed and unconstructed designs as a design consultant and entered many international design contests with works created in Hungary as well as abroad.

His several thousands of drawings analyse the transcendence of spirit to matter.

Drawing for him is the crucial phase of architectural design, which serves for analysis and articulating suggestions, while allowing to live the sacral experience of creation. He draws his hundreds of architectural process drawings and design details on opaque paper in Antique Sepia ink and a Mont Blanc pen. He draws with effortless elegance, having an awesomely firm hand. His inspired and precise line drawings reflect the design process as well as the Thought embodied in the building. These drawings reflect mainly on the possibilities of spatial arrangements, provide questions on the nature, extension and quality of space. Peter Magyar draws with a hyper perspective aiming at totality and during this process he always has the “visibility” of illustrating geometry under control, the experiences of foreground and background. His drawings also advise us on his research method: through them he has developed and passed on to his students an architectural approach, an open design process that helps explore the thought content of spatial processes and their interpretation. In his own words:

“Design is a mentally and corporally experienced process, which step by step evokes the mythology of the building, applying the racial memory of our physical body. Accordingly, architecture, through drawings, or in fortuitous cases, in constructed form, realizes, ’embodies’ a philosophy, provided if it investigates the basic questions of knowledge, reality and existence. My intent is therefore, to unify feeling and thinking through will. The will is manifested with drawing. /…/ I conduct my investigations with ‘Surface Drawings’, or ‘Spaceprints’. /…/ This method simultaneously investigates, analyses, explores and articulates solid and void, or matter and space. These Spaceprints are therefore the first manifestations of the intended physical reality, so they are illustrating the transition of spirit to matter.”

Our exhibition presents only a fracture of his oeuvre including several thousands of drawings. It seeks to illustrate Peter Magyar’s special way of approaching the built environment and through this the entire human civilisation by displaying details from his research and analyses.

The exhibited drawings encourage viewers to participate. One cannot remain a mere observer: by browsing phase drawings and fragments and through associations evoked by one’s attention we get drawn into this creative procedure. We reflect together with the artist on – not only architectural – questions provided by the drawings and we take part in interpreting possible answers.