Folyovits Residence, Kolozsvár

“Wigand had […] a design commission that he did not dare to undertake on his own: a residential house had to be designed in Cluj (and supervised on site, with full accounting) for János Folyovits, the city’s chief clerk. In the course of our joint design work, I came to realize that Wigand Ede was indeed a uniquely brilliant applied artist, but that he lacked architectural and artistic competence in architecture proper; he was incapable, with his own knowledge, of solving a serious, realistic architectural task, even if it was only a simple family house. […]

This, however, did not hinder our friendship, which remained unbroken until his tragic death (during the Second World War, he perished in an air-raid shelter during the siege of Buda).”

— Károly Kós: Autobiography, ed. Samu Benkő, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó–Kriterion, Budapest–Bucharest, 1991, p. 110.

Károly Kós and Toroczkai Wigand Ede worked together in the spring and summer of 1910 on the design of the villa for János Folyovits, chief clerk of the city of Cluj. The building was completed within the same year as part of a garden suburb developed for municipal officials.

The villa, originally set above street level in what was described at the time as a “picturesque garden,” features an asymmetrically composed main façade. Its most distinctive elements are the ground-floor terrace framed by carved stone columns and the integrated upper-floor balcony above it. The apparent scale and confident architectural articulation of the exterior—using the words of Anthony Gall—conceal a plan that is in fact modest and somewhat awkward, organized around a narrow central staircase.

Today, the original villa has been subdivided into several separate apartments. On the main façade, the intercolumniations of the projecting porch have been infilled, and the balustrade of the balcony is no longer original.