The Oeuvre Of An Architect

Text: Zoltán Szécsi

Owing to his eternal merits and achievements in introducing and facilitating the evolution of early Modernist architecture in Hungary, János Wanner’s name has a fine ring as of today for the best and well-informed Hungarian professionals. His father was a Swiss-born craftsman, who came to settle down and find his fortune in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that flourished at the end of the 19th century. He moved to Budapest and started a family. His son who became an architect spent a year at the turn of the 1920s and 30s in Paris in Le Corbusier’s office where he embraced the atmosphere of Modernism. In 1947 he moved to Switzerland. The majority of the multi-unit apartment houses he designed there are Modernist in style, whilst the others are rooted in local vernacular traditions or even reflect characteristics of Expressionism. A significant feature of his works is that he was thinking within the framework building pairs instead of individual buildings, which means asymmetrically coupled structures or their series evolved and then united according to some logic or order.