Functional Thinking in the Architecture of Samu Pecz and his Followers

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse how functional thinking can be reflected in the activity of a historicizing architect, or how his thoughts could influence his followers’ later activity.In the first decades of the 20th century, architecture was characterized by a special duality: the increasingly vigorous emergence of modernity next to the insistence on the historical forms. While the main characteristic of Samu Pecz’s (1854-1922) historicizing architectural style resulted from his adherence to the historical, particularly the mediaeval styles, with their practicality, his works emerged amongst the work of his contemporaries, who also saw to realize principally in his work “to build from inside outwards”. This thought is analysed in several of Pecz’s buildings, which were designed for the Campus of the Technical University in Lágymányos (a southern district of Buda) in Budapest.Besides his remarkable oeuvre as an architect, Samu Pecz was also a great scholar and lecturer of the Technical University. As one of his pupils, Béla Rerrich summarized, Samu Pecz “...was a genuine master of structures.” It is true that he always emphasised the importance of finding solutions to structural issues. He helped the spread of constructional innovations in Hungary, especially iron and ferroconcrete structures.