Abstract
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.
Highlights
Man’s ancient desire to bind his life - or his everyday dwelling - to sacral places can be best illustrated with the nearly 3000 year old biblical text chosen as an epigraph for this paper
Among 20th century Hungarian Protestant - Calvinist or Lutheran - congregation centres built after 1920 we find an increasing number of building complexes where the church as a sacral space and the profane community functions serving the congregation’s aims can be united by a mobile wall
Summarising our investigations we can see that the church connected with spaces of a profane function vary in measure in different ages and among denominations
Summary
Man’s ancient desire to bind his life - or his everyday dwelling - to sacral places can be best illustrated with the nearly 3000 year old biblical text chosen as an epigraph for this paper. There were no side wings joined to the catholic churches in the Middle Ages and the early Modern period, except in the previous examples, so the profane and sacral functions in the same space did not co-exist in a flexible way.
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