Viola Kornél Residence

This two-storey villa, located in one of Cluj’s garden suburbs, is distinguished by the unusual undulating profile of its main façade. Although the feature can be compared to related tendencies in contemporary German residential architecture, Kós himself identified its source rather in the vernacular Baroque porches of manor houses and churches in Székelyland. The ground floor accommodates a single large apartment, while the mansard apartment beneath the roof is accessed via a staircase with a separate entrance from the ground floor.

Kós Károly discussed the influence of vernacular Baroque architecture in a conversation with Samu Benkő:

“– And what became of the Baroque?

– It, too, became Transylvanian. By the time it reached us, it had already undergone significant changes. Everywhere something was altered: something was taken away and something added. It arrived in Hungary via Vienna, and from there came here. The Viennese Baroque of the age of Maria Theresa was no longer what the Italian or the French Baroque had been. The Hungarian version was further simplified. And the farther east it came, the simpler it became. At the same time, it increasingly intertwined with earlier styles, which by then had spread everywhere through the hands of vernacular craftsmen. With the exception of a few Jesuit churches—whose designs and master builders were brought from abroad—Baroque architecture, too, became local in character. Here, no entirely new class of masters could arise that would overturn earlier architecture from the ground up. The styles fused through a slow transition. Baroque was absorbed into vernacular architecture. I observed this above all in Székelyland. I drew many Baroque buildings, in both villages and towns. I liked them.

– Did you also use certain Baroque motifs in your own designs? If I look out the window here, I see one of Uncle Károly’s houses on Rákóczi Street. Its gable seems reminiscent of the bourgeois houses of Torda?

– You are right. I was particularly fond of the houses of Torda, and as you rightly say, when designing the house opposite, I made use of lines I had come to like there. I was also extremely taken with the Baroque portico of that beautiful church in Háromszék—the one in Gelence. The way it integrates into the mass of a much earlier building… What a refined, beautiful structure. It does not oppose the building. It does not appear as a superfluous attachment.”*

— Excerpt from “An Autumn Conversation with Károly Kós about the Stones of Transylvania”, interview by Samu Benkő, Utunk, 1977, p. 120.