Church as a home - sacral and profane functions in modern Hungarian Churches
Abstract
Contemporary church architecture in Hungary is one of the most monumental and representative architectural topics of the period after the political change; following forty years of communist dictatorship it became possible for congregations to freely raise new church buildings, asserting at the same time their social rights. It is remarkable that among the newly built churches the majority appear through the uniting of diverse functions such as congregation centres. The sacral church spaces of these architectural complexes are flexible and thus often extended with the community´s educational or other functional units used for non-sacral social gatherings, as a result the church may really become the home of a community. The article tries to encompass this phenomenon by analysing in the context of historical antecedents a typical contemporary Catholic and Protestant Hungarian church.