The paper analyses a specific building type, the Baroque church architecture of historic Hungary, the Greek-cross ground-plan evangelic churches. This church type has different prototypes: the Huguenot and Scandinavian Protestant churches in Europe, the model plans of architectural treatises -first of all the treatises of Leonhard Christoph Sturm -and the Lutheran wooden churches of Silesia. The symbolic content of the cruciform plan was also popular among the Lutheran congregations, which is explainable with theological reasons as well as with the good visual and acoustic conditions, furthermore with the construction benefits from its application. The Slovak Lutheran congregations played a determining role in the domestication and the dissemination of the layout type. The late Baroque central Greek-cross plan is an important antecedent for the renewal of the late 19 th century Protestant church architecture.
Contemporary church architecture in Hungary is one of the most monumental and representative architectural topics of the period after the political change; following forty years of communist dictatorship it became possible for congregations to freely raise new church buildings, asserting at the same time their social rights. It is remarkable that among the newly built churches the majority appear through the uniting of diverse functions such as congregation centres. The sacral church spaces of these architectural complexes are flexible and thus often extended with the community's educational or other functional units used for non-sacral social gatherings, as a result the church may really become the home of a community. The article tries to encompass this phenomenon by analysing in the context of historical antecedents a typical contemporary Catholic and Protestant Hungarian church.
The article reviews Ernő Foerk’s career through the perspective of his sacred buildings. Ernő Foerk’s oeuvre accounts for a significant proportion of these works. Most of his accomplished churches were made in a Historicist style with a Latin-cross-shaped plan and facade tower. His designs which remained on paper, however, show a more diverse picture from both spatial and stylistic aspect. A number of plans were marked together with Gyula Petrovácz, however, we should presume Foerk had a more significant role in the artistic formation. In addition to the general historicist language, his works also had unique stylistic features, which were mainly related to the design of towers’ proportions, windows, pediments and spires, and to the use of bricks in facade design.
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