Csáky Tamás - Árkay

Our volume presents five members of three generations of an artist family, whose intertwined creative activities span almost a century, from the 1870s to the 1960s. Among them were architects Kallina Mór, Árkay Aladár and Árkay Bertalan, and the other two family members also worked in the arts related to architecture: Sándor Árkay as a locksmith, and Árkayné Sztehlo Lily as a glass window designer. Their work, previously known only sketchily, spanning historical and stylistic eras, primarily enriched Budapest's architectural heritage, but their works can also be found in many small and large domestic settlements. The central personality of the family history and thus of our book is Árkay Aladár, born in 1868. At the age of twenty, he drew plans for locksmith works in the workshop of his father, Sándor Árkay, and a decade later, as a co-designer with his father-in-law, Mór Kallina, he was already working on such important historicizing public buildings as the Honvéd, which stood in the Buda Castle Headquarters or Vigadó Buda. His most characteristic works are late Art Nouveau works from the years before the First World War: the Fasori Reformed church in Városliget, and the family houses of the small-Svábhegy settlement of Bírák és Ügyések. At the end of the 1920s, with the cooperation of Bertalan and his daughter-in-law, Lily Sztehlo, he created emblematic works of modern Catholic church architecture and church art in Hungary: the parish church in Győr-Gyarváros and Városmajor. Bertalan Árkay was not only one of the busiest modern family house designers of the twenties and thirties, but also the most prolific master of the little-known church architecture of the fifties and sixties. The studies in our book concisely, but with scientific precision, review the works of each artist and analyze their most important works; their ensemble offers a special section on the history of domestic architecture of the century in question. Most of the previously unpublished illustration material in the volume came from the Árkay family's rich legacy of plans and photographs.