Modern studio apartments in Budapest in the 1930s
Until the early 1930s, a one-room flat was synonymous with a worker's flat, and this stigma was also carried by the small flats in the new tenements. In 1928, the year of its launch, in the magazine Tér és Forma (‘Space and Form’), Jenő Padányi Gulyás spoke of modern small flats as a type of housing that was to be built for workers as a company benefit and to have an educational effect. Five years later, the same journal published the plans of György Oblath and Gábor Preisich, in which the design duo replaced the old apartments of an Erzsébetváros block with a healthier, modern apartment block with ‘adequate daylight’. They also rejected the one-room flat as ‘inappropriate’, and only included a few studio flats designed exclusively for singles. Almost half of the 500 flats on the proposed site at the time were one-bedroom plus kitchen flats, which were found to be best replaced by two-bedroom flats. In 1936, Lajos Kozma came to the defense of the ‘minimalist’ middle-class flats. In his view, smaller living space ‘does not mean poverty or a disadvantage’, but rather ‘a planned idea’ for the benefit of the tenant. He contrasted space-wasting old-fashioned building methods with the economical use of space, which offers ‘comfort and practicality’. In 1938, József Fischer published plans for a modern apartment building on Thököly Road, together with data on the building's profitability. Of the nine flats planned for the building, three were three-room flats, three one-room flats and three studio apartments. The investment promised the developer a 9% return. Fischer calculated that even at a 4% return – which was still a decent one – it would be worthwhile for public bodies to invest in small apartments, so that the studio apartments, costing 700 Hungarian pengő, and the one-bedroom apartments, costing 900 Hungarian pengő, could be rented for 320-340 Hungarian pengő.
While in the 1930s the architectural profession accepted the rise of the middle-class one-room flat, concerns were not diminished. Márton Tímár was concerned for the families living in single-occupancy apartments, which propagated the 'one-child system'. For them, following the Dutch-German model, he came up with four types of low-cost flats with separate bedrooms (which are suitable for raising children): one- and two-bedroom flats with kitchen-living rooms and small flats with a living room, kitchen and one or two bedrooms. In 1941, Virgil Bierbauer took a more radical stance against studio flats and one-bedroom plus hall flats: ‘While in the old room plus kitchen flats, with their 20 m2 living room and 8 m2 kitchen, the working class brought up children in spite of the asocial conditions, the young couple moving into a flat with a rent of 1200-1500 pengő will be wary of having children, and in the one-room flat with a hall with a rent of 1800-2000 pengő the situation will be no better, because in that dark hole with many doors, without sunlight and ventilation, called a hall, one can at best play bridge.’ In his article, he branded the room-plus-hall flat as an ‘anti-national abuse’ and the studio as a type of housing ‘which diminishes the right, or even the duty, of families to have children’.
In the 1930s, the idea of the minimal apartment (the equivalent of the studio in the contemporary Hungarian housing market) and the design of minimal rooms appeared in Hungarian modern architecture and architectural theory, mainly in the works of Lajos Kozma. Kozma summarized the correct design principles of the functional, rationalized small apartment and the minimum rooms, the criteria of a proper floor plan layout, in his article on the Minimal rooms of small apartments (1936) published in Tér és Forma. He stressed that the minimum rooms in small dwellings are not the result of austerity but of correct sizing: ‘Economy does not mean thrift, poverty or a disadvantage, but it does mean the carrying through of a plan of thought along the whole line which is ultimately in the interest of the occupant.’
From the spaciousness of the room itself, from following the ‘space-wasting dogma of the old style of building’, does not follow the proper utility value of the kitchen, bathroom, hall, maid's room: ‘...the utility value depends on the correct dimensioning of doors and windows and their sensible positioning, on the correct proportion of width and length and, last but not least, on the functional positioning of the furnishings, these organs of the room.’
So, a 4 m2 bathroom or a 16 m2 room can have a much higher utility value than a large room in an old apartment, if the fixtures, doors and windows are in the right place. In these minimal spaces, the builders compensate for the lost cubic meters by built-in furniture. According to Kozma, the dining car kitchens of trains were the forerunners of the the 'small' kitchens of post-World War I housing estates and building exhibitions. The modern fittings of 'everyone's kitchen' were discovered by large-scale industrial production, which gave rise to the sink with a spout, the gas and electric cooker, which could fit into a small space, or the electric ice box, and the electric cleaning appliances. Kozma speaks about the furnishings of modern small apartments, the new kitchen appliances, and later about the modern small apartment or the studio itself as a minimum level of living that is accessible to everyone. In reality, in the Hungarian housing market of the 1930s and early 1940s, modern minimalist dwellings, i.e., studio apartments appeared as expensive housing types affordable only to a few.
In Kozma's small apartment, the bathroom is given a prominent role, becoming the ‘health center’ of the apartment, the first room to be truly undecorated and to give way to ‘genuine quality materials and a thoughtful, refined, pure form’. He wrote almost an ode to the toilet bowl: ‘The faience toilet bowl, with its smooth and simplified form, perfectly adapted to its function, became the master of all subsequent furnishings: in its honesty, its materiality, its technically thought-out shapes, it became the true “unadorned” utilitarian object.’
A year later, in 1937, Kozma published a study entitled The floor plan of the hotel room, also in Tér és Forma. Here again, the architect speaks of a living space organized along functional lines, in the form of a hotel room arranged by a rational floor plan, which in its whole structure, in its mobile or space-saving furnishings (sofa bed, built-in furniture) built into the walls, bears many similarities to a residential apartment. Kozma's 1940 volume, The New House, deals with the design of detached houses, but here too the text revolves around the problem of creating a functional, economical living space designed by a strict plan-organizer. Like almost all modern architects who sought a solution to the issue of the right plan and layout of the flat and the house, such as the much cited Le Corbusier, Kozma thought a lot about the issues of the urban dwelling and the detached house plan ‘parallelly’.
In his planned and realized studio apartments, Lajos Kozma also adhered to the principles laid down in his theoretical article, and designed not only the floor plan of the apartments, but often also their folding, space-saving furnishings (as integral components of the homes). Two of his best-known modern apartment buildings are the apartment house at 13 Régiposta Street in the city center, designed with Vilmos Dénes, which contains only studio apartments, and the Átrium House on Margit Boulevard (three studio apartments per floor and a cinema on the ground floor).
The latter ‘...had a built-in wardrobe, a closet-kitchen and a bathroom attached to the rooms. [Kozma] also provided a plan for the living room, with low furniture, which, correctly arranged, left a suitably large, coherent space.’ Tímea Tóth writes about the apartments and the furnishings of the Régiposta Street studio apartment complex: ‘The architect was guided by the same principles as in the case of the Margit Boulevard apartment house: he designed the smallest space with the most functional installations. Thus, each apartment had a built-in closet-kitchen that contained everything from a sink to a glass shelf for spices, and the flat also included a laundry cupboard, a built-in wardrobe and a bookshelf.’
Kozma therefore considered modern furniture as an integral part of the apartment, necessary for a well-functioning small flat. Once these furnishings became, according to Kozma's study, part of mass production, i.e., ‘everyone's furniture’, ‘the small flat became as common a necessity as the small car: mass production with qualities for mass needs.’
According to the designer, people who used to live only as tenants in strangers' flats were finally able to own their own flat: ‘even in the simplest solution, where the hallway with its built-in wardrobes replaces the walk-in wardrobe, where there is only a small closet-kitchen next to the bathroom, they can have a very practical living cell’. These ‘living cells’ were also suitable for childless couples because of the rational use of space, according to Kozma. Kozma has achieved a high level of harmony between function and aesthetics, as exemplified by the design of the bathroom in the studio apartment house: ‘In addition to the hygiene features – washbasin with a mouth washer, bathtub, toilet, bidet – everything is designed for comfort: a rail for the shower curtain, a reading lamp recessed into the ceiling, a window and adjustable ventilation, a wall-mounted grab rail, a soap and sponge holder. The architect created its visual unity by scaling all the objects to a multiple of the tile size, in the manner of Japanese tatami. The black and white tiles were complemented by a bold, strongly textured waxed oil paint on the ceiling.’
The new, smaller, modern homes of the 1930s were therefore designed with light, simple, small furnishings instead of heavy, bulky furniture.
We also know the building, apartment and interior design plans of the two modern tenement houses of Lajos Kozma from drawings and photographs published in Tér és Forma, and we can draw a picture of the tenants from the 1941 census apartment records.
In the tenement house at 13 Régiposta Street in 1941, most of the tenants lived alone or with a relative (an adult child or a sibling) in the small apartments. In addition to the shops and the two landlords' flats, the building in the city center was exclusively occupied by studio apartments, which were rented out at a very high price of 1300 pengő plus utilities (about 1600 pengő). Of the 16 flats in the apartment block, all of them were rented by single tenants with the exception of one. There were 7 single women and 8 men living in the building. The majority of the women were inactive in the labor market, supported by widows' pensions or private assets, in addition to the three working landladies – a dressmaker, a corset-maker and a clerk. Among the unmarried tenants was the name of Mrs Lajos Hatvany, née Erzsébet Marton, who was by then divorced from Baron Lajos Hatvany, a writer, critic and patron of the arts from a wealthy family of factory owners. At the time of the 1941 census, Erzsébet Marton was listed as a tenant on the housing register whose income came from renting her property. After the Second World War, she moved to New York, where she ran a theatrical brokerage agency from 1954 until her death at the age of 90. The men among the tenants were typically unmarried private servants (bank officers, bank managers), but there were also members of parliament and journalists.
Of the 29 apartments in the Átrium House on Margit Boulevard, 17 were studio flats, shared by nine single people (five women, four men) and eight households of two. Here, the rent was considerably lower than on Régiposta Street, at 700-900 pengő (900-1100 pengő with utilities). The single female tenants were all working, in highly prestigious jobs. Among them were a 41-year-old unmarried deputy chief physician, a parliamentary clerk and a clerk in the parliamentary library. The single women living in the Átrium House were unmarried (or divorced) women aged close to 40, while the women living in the flats in Régiposta Street were widows aged 55-65 and divorced women aged around 40. As in Kozma's apartment block in the city centre, the men were mostly unmarried private servants.
In the apartments of the modern tenement houses built in the 1930s on Margit Boulevard, in addition to single men, there were also retired men of high status (opera house members), military officers (an army captain), university students at the beginning of their careers, usually divorced or unmarried men. The architect Egon Pfannl also appears on the 1941 census apartment records as a dependent, single, unmarried architecture student. Of the eight two-person households in Margit Boulevard, three were occupied by a married couple (civil servants), three by an elderly mother and her adult child, and one by two sisters (a 34-year-old divorced female university lecturer and a 32-year-old unmarried pharmacist), and one by an elderly men with his male roommate recorded as a guest.
The mass takeover of modern studio flats in the 1930s triggered a variety of reactions in the rental market, for example, the publication of flat designs in contemporary architectural magazines, especially in the modernist Tér és Forma, the appearance of interior design consultants who dealt in finding the appropriate space-saving furnishing for small flats, and the presentation of topos associated with the modern small flat type in the metropolis in literary texts or later memoirs.
Tér és Forma’s post-1935 interior design articles consistently referred to studio flats as housing units for single tenants, which were now available not only to bachelors (i.e., single men) but also to single, working, urban women who did not lead a household.
Dezső Vágó's ‘bachelorette’ room plan, published in 1936, shows a picture of a large, multifunctional room in which the functions of three rooms, a living room, a study and a bedroom are combined. Each of these room functions is represented by a light ensemble of small furniture arranged in a corner. Also in 1936, Miklós Velits presented to the readers of the magazine an article on the design of a flat for working women in Vienna, stressing the importance for the busy urban woman of a furniture collection with a smooth surface that is easy to clean. A bachelor’s home design can be found in György Fränkel’s interior design book Combined Room, Combined Furniture. Here, the designer presented a darker-toned furniture ensemble, strictly arranged against the wall and fitting together, which – with its extending dining table, sofa bed, bookcases and hanging cupboards – incorporated the old dining room, bedroom and master bedroom triad in a single space. Like the designs by Vágó and Fränkel, Kató Nádor published sketches of multi-functional, combined living rooms, albeit without specifying the gender of the occupant(s).
According to Pál Nádai, a natural feature of modern, space-saving rental apartments is the appearance of a multifunctional room that combines the functions of several rooms (not only in the case of studio apartments, but also in the case of two-room apartments with 3-4-5 functions, for example). The furnishings had to take into account that women of the time were office workers, who did not have the means to pay for domestic servants, so the furniture had to be utilized as servants, as machines to help with the housework. According to Nádai, the lives of working women in America were already aided by such servant-machine equipment and mechanized homes in the 1930s: ‘It's already dark outside by the time she gets home from work. She pushes a button and a plane of the wall opens up almost unnoticeably. Two beds are lowered down, of course, already made. In the morning, she cleans with a machine. She has tea in an electric booth. She quickly airs out the flat, then hurries to work. She presses the button again. A light motor lifts the two beds back up against the wall and the lattice door slams shut. We're not there yet, but we're heading in this direction.’
Judit Verő-Valló (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(2024. május)
