Frigyes Schulek’s Calvinist Reformed Church in Szeged: A Particular Case of Medieval Design in Historicism

Abstract

Analysing the original drawings of Frigyes Schulek’s Calvinist Reformed Church in Szeged from 1882 kept in the Plan Collection and Archives of the BME Department for History of Architecture and of Monuments, its design process of geometric proportioning method can be entirely reconstructed. The result of this analysis shows that the Historicism of Schulek was not merely the replication of stylistic patterns of Gothic art but also the application of Medieval architectural principals and ideas. In the case of the Calvinist Reformed Church in Szeged, the essence of the design ‘in style’ was inspired by the contradictions of the function and the position of the building beside the main theoretic recommendation of Protestant church architecture of the time (Eisenacher Regulativ). The purity of the interior required by the function was compensated by the complexity of the geometry. The analysis presented in the paper sheds light not only on Schulek’s approach to Medieval architecture but also the various leve