József Fischer maintained a friendly correspondence for decades with the world-famous architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer. We can glean knowledge about episodes in their personal and professional lives from these letters, learning which issues and tasks occupied them and what the professional atmosphere they were involved in was like. In a letter dated the 26th of April 1936, Fischer even talked about the construction of the Rózsi Walter Villa, along with several other topics. The letter has survived in the Marcel Breuer estate held in the archives of the Syracuse University Libraries alongside numerous other letters written by Fischer. The archives incorrectly dated the letter to the 16th of April 1926, but its content clearly dates it to the year 1936.
“A villa of mine is currently being built on Bajza Street, perhaps I mentioned, for an opera singer, it’s an interesting task, achieving a connection with the garden at the base of the apartment houses, and besides that making something of the view of the neighbor and the southeastern sun being blocked by the apartment houses – perhaps it will work out even so,” wrote Fischer.
“Of course, this is just a measly villa in the end and large apartment houses are needed for membership in the chamber,” he continued by comparison with Breuer, who was by then living in London, working on his large-scale “plans for the city of the future,” which Fischer referred to several times in the letter. The designs of Breuer and his colleague, F.R.S. Yorke, for the “Garden City of the Future” with parks and high-rises had been a hit amongst the Hungarian devotees to the modern movement. According to the architect Farkas Molnár, Breuer had completely outdone Le Corbusier, which Fischer states in this letter. Tér és Forma (Space and Form) even published the plan through Fischer’s intermediation, and Fischer wrote the accompanying article (J.F.: Park és városcentrum [Park and City Center]. Tér és Forma 1936/no. 8, 217–221). This article is one of the reports through which the magazine followed Breuer’s career abroad. The article together with the letter also provides information about the network of connections that was organized around CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, which included Fischer and Breuer as active members.
Nevertheless, Fischer was not left out of designing apartment houses. He participated as a designer in the construction of the apartment houses of the National Insurance Institute on Tisza Kálmán Square (now II János Pál pápa Square). The significance of this high-rise apartment house complex is that it was the only place in Budapest in the interwar years where the more up-to-date development style of free-standing, high-rise blocks set back from the street was employed. According to Fischer’s recollection, the Rózsi Walter Villa also helped him obtain a commission for an apartment house, “The villa was not yet finished when the owner of the neighboring lot [R. Rudolf Flusser] asked for me to make a plan for his lot, although he also requested a plan from the architect Leszner [Manó Lessner], who is his distant relative, but if my design is better, I will get the commission. Two days later, I handed over the plan and the next day I worked on the permit plan”. (Lapis Angularis I. Források a Magyar Építészeti Múzeum gyűjteményéből [Sources from the Collections of the Hungarian Museum of Architecture] – Hauszmann Alajos, Maróti Géza, Kozma Lajos, Kotsis Iván, Borbíró Virgil, Fischer József, Gádoros Lajos, ed. Virág Hajdú – Endre Prakfalvi. Budapest: OMvH Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, 1995, 320.) The apartment house designed by Fischer even today stands at 8 Bajza Street next to the villa.
We would hereby like to express our gratitude to Éva Horányi, curator of collection at the Museum of Applied Arts, who brought to our attention the letter available at the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive of the Syracuse University Libraries.
Ágnes Anna Sebestyén
On the far right, the apartment house at 8 Bajza Street designed by József Fischer during construction, 1936. HMA MPDC Hungarian Museum of Architecture, photograph by Tivadar Kozelka, 1936
Marcel Breuer and F.R.S. Yorke, plan for the city of the future (J.F.: Park és városcentrum [Park and City Center]. Tér és Forma 1936/no. 8, 217.)