The Hungarian Cube is a kind of standardized housing dating back to the 1920s that is found in many of the country’s suburbs and towns, and that has become associated with post-war communist Hungary.
Named after János Kádár, Hungary’s communist leader from 1956 to 1988, the buildings are often covered in ornamental decorations by their owners, who painted them as a rebellious act of self-expression.
These unusual structures are now the subject of German-Hungarian artist Katharina Roter’s book Hungarian Cubes.
Roters, who moved from Germany to a small Hungarian village in 2003, was drawn to their “almost absurd beauty” of abstract, geometric patterns.
As an outsider, she was able to appreciate the artistic integrity of these dwellings without the historical and emotional baggage of a local.
Considered relics of the past by modern Hungarian society that views them with “a mixture of disregard and hostility”, they are slowly being demolished or renovated as the population grows more affluent.
“They are the “botched workers and peasants bastard” that defaces the landscape like a gaping wound, and their ornamental attributes are dismissed as nothing but superficial, “slapdash, kitsch potpourri”, she told Dezeen.
The houses are a symbol of their inhabitants’ attempt to craft an identity and a visual representation of their protest against state-sanctioned conformity.
Roters hopes her book will serve as a historical record of a disappearing phenomenon, and a remembrance of a past way of life.
Read the full article at Dezeen, and purchase the book here.
[via Dezeen]