József Vágó: Un architecte hongrois dans la tourmente européenne

Architect, theorist, urbanist and writer, Jozsef Vago worked in Budapest (1900-1919, 1926-1940), Rome (1919-1926) and Geneva (1927-1935), before settling in France (1940-1947). As a young graduate, he joined the Hungarian Secession founded by Odon Lechner and, like many architects of his generation, set out to develop a new national architectural language that valued popular culture. Jozsef Vago is today considered one of the leading figures of the Hungarian architectural revival. His achievements in Budapest between 1903 and 1914, jewels of "national" architecture impregnated with Viennese modernism, bear witness to his openness to the West and his attention to social issues. A member of the Werkbund, he was involved in the revolutionary period of 1918-1919 and was forced to emigrate to Italy when Admiral Horthy came to power. Settled in Rome between 1920 and 1926, he tried in vain to integrate into the profession: he developed new social housing typologies for the Roman garden cities, published numerous projects under the name "Giuseppe Vago", but only managed to obtain one commission in Rome. Without resources, faced with xenophobia and fascism, he moved to Budapest, where he was prevented from practicing by the Hungarian Order of Architects, created in 1926. His victory in the competition for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1927 inaugurated a new phase in his career. His disagreements with his associates - Henri-Paul Nénot, Jules Flegenheimer, Camille Lefèvre and Carlo Broggi - and with Le Corbusier during the realization of the project prompted him, in the 1930s and 1940s, to take part in the European architectural debate, to begin an important work of criticism and to elaborate a veritable philosophy of architecture and urbanism. Combating the positions of the architectural avant-garde - and in particular Le Corbusier - he tried to establish a synthesis between the ideals of Art Nouveau and modernism, believing that the architect should strive to meet the social and economic aspirations of the Modern Movement without renouncing the "superfluous", that is to say, the artistic quality and ornamentation. This research, which appears in his theoretical work Through the Cities (1930) and in his project of urbanization of Budapest (1933-1937), finds its culmination in his theoretical project of reconstruction opposed to the precepts of the CIAM and the Athens Charter: the City of the Future (1940-1945).