Thursday, 20th June 2019 at 17.00
Book launch
Masters of Architecture series
Holnap Kiadó, 2019
introducing the book: Tamás Dévényi architect
Gyula Rimanóczy (1903–1958) began his university studies in the year the Trianon Peace Treaty was signed (1920). His career began in the second half of the 20s, as the centuries-old premodern trends stalled and our architecture became characterized by the dominance of neostyles.
Rimanóczy’s style took a modernist turn with the Church of Four Evangelists in 1930. A year later he was already working on one of the masterpieces of our sacred architecture between the two world wars, the Church of St. Anthony of Padua in Pasarét.
The modern villas he designed for the Bányász, Szakáts, Szél and Horváth and other families in Budapest and Debrecen, as well as his public buildings such as Postapalota on Dob Street and the National Social Insurance Institute’s clinic on Mester Street, are pivotal works of modern Hungarian architecture.
The rebuilding of our country after another historical cataclysm (1945) was thought to be accomplished through modernism. However, the sovietization of the country brought the mandatory primacy of socialist realism, which, from a formal point of view, meant the renaissance of neoclassicism. Rimanóczy managed to create timeless masterpieces under these dire circumstances as well: the Győr Technical School and the R building of the University of Technology on the Danube. His early death put a premature end to his remarkable modernist period.
