Calvinist Parsonage and Director's-Cantor Lodgings, Kolozsvár

Károly Kós prepared designs not only for the already completed “rooster church” but also for the parsonage and the residences of the church employees. The L-shaped buildings were intended to frame the street-facing view of the church, creating a small forecourt in front of it. The entrances to the parsonage on the left, as well as to the other building housing the residences of the director, the cantor, and the church sexton, did not open directly from the street. Each courtyard entrance was emphasized by individual architectural elements—arches, small staircases, projecting wooden balconies, and similar features.

The two-storey street façade was animated by the symmetrical gables of the separate roofs, while the courtyard wings—originally planned as two-storey volumes—were designed to be reduced to a single storey near the church.

The outbreak of the First World War unfortunately prevented the realization of the project, and the buildings have never been constructed.

The design was described in the following terms in a contemporary ecclesiastical publication:

“The observer is also troubled by the fact that no proper courtyard has been formed around the church, and that the building stands forlorn and abandoned in the middle of the rectangular plot, between the unbuilt street-side corners.

How different the image will be, however, and how greatly it will elevate the church and its surroundings, when—also according to the designs of Károly Kós—those houses in Hungarian taste, similar in spirit to the church, are built on the street-side corners to the right and left, intended by the congregation on the one hand for the minister and assistant minister, and on the other for teachers’ and church residences.

This plot will then become a truly Hungarian courtyard: a wonderfully beautiful cultural ensemble, into whose fenced enclosure one will look with joyful satisfaction and deep spiritual delight, for the radiant prominence of the church and the cheerful, beautiful Hungarian houses nestled beneath it will proclaim for all time that yes, a Hungarian style does indeed exist. Hungarian architecture already possesses all its essential elements, and we already have an artist capable of expressing our national spirit through the beautiful formal language of architecture.”

— Lajos Mihalik: The Church as a Work of Art, in: István Aracs (ed.), The History of the Reformed Church of Cluj-Monostor, Lyceum, Cluj, 1914 (new edition: Association of Transylvanian Hungarians, Budapest, 1993, pp. 41–55).