Private residence (Crow Castle), Sztána

“Thus, I acquired a small bit of land on a steep hillside in Sztána (Stana) above the station, and there I stuck a little house.” (Kós Károly: Életrajz. Szerk.: Benkő Samu. Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó–Kriterion, Budapest–Bukarest, 1991. 118.)

In the summer of 1909, before his return to Budapest, Károly Kós decided to look for a building site in the Kalotaszeg region that was so close to his heart. He prepared sketches of solitary houses with towers standing on hills, and at this time already used the title Crow Castle.

In the fall of 1912, he resigned his teaching position at the School of Industrial Design, said goodbye to Budapest, and moved with his family to the house in Sztána that he had originally built as a vacation home. By this time, his design and construction work had already tied him to Transylvania in any case.

At the turn of the century in Europe, numerous artists saw the home as the motivational force behind change and the opportunity for a new way of life. For Kós, Crow Castle represented his means to realize the ideal lifestyle conceived by the Englishmen Ruskin and Morris and the Finn Akseli Gallen-Kallela, achieved by abandoning life in a large city and moving to the countryside. He knew Eliel Saarinen personally, and brought Gallen-Kallela to the Kalotaszeg area himself.

Simple, clear geometry appears in the massing of Crow Castle. The connection between the round tower and its rectangular counterpart was an experiment inspired by his study of medieval and vernacular types of Transylvanian architecture. The building integrates into the Kalotaszeg landscape, which is interspersed with rolling hills, fields, and groves of beech trees. Its rubble-stone walls crowned by steep shingle roofs dominate the view of the valley, which reminded Kós of a Romantic English park.

Only four preliminary draft designs and the ground plan from the 1925 remodeling are known of the completed building. On the ground floor at the bottom of the tower, a small alcove and bench surrounded a folk-style, artistic tile stove (the latter has not survived). The kitchen and a dining area/living room were here, while the bedroom and the studio were on the upper floor. This was expanded in 1925 due to the needs of his family of six by adding a room on the ground floor and on the upper level in a section erected on the hillside behind the building. The home was significantly damaged in 1944, when it was ransacked and looted. The family left the estate at this time and fled to Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). Only later was the property returned to their ownership.

The Crow Farm

In the middle of the 1930s, they built a separate studio and farmstead on the slope above Crow Castle. The prelude to this was a small lookout tower, which the architect had erected decades earlier. The buildings were the center for Károly Kós’s farming in Sztána. The farmstead was destroyed in 1944, but its ruins can still be seen today.