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MANIC MODERN: ELEMÉR ZALOTAYVon der Megastruktur zum Selbstbau
From Megastructure to Self-Build
(The book will be published in German language.)
After years of research, conversations, archival discoveries, travels between Hungary and Switzerland and countless rounds of editing, Manic Modern. Elemér Zalotay is finally going to print. On 30 October – Elemér Zalotay’s birthday – we will present the book in Budapest.
A Radical Outsider of Modern Architecture
Elemér Zalotay (1932–2020) was a Hungarian-Swiss architect and engineer and one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century architecture. His life and work unfolded between different political systems, countries and disciplines. Celebrated as a young architect in Hungary, his visionary proposals for megastructures were later considered too individualistic for socialist planning; after emigrating to Switzerland, his ideas often appeared too radical for established architectural practice. He remained a border-crosser – between East and West, architecture and engineering, collective ambition and radical individualism.
At the centre of his work was the idea of providing housing on an entirely different scale. His Strip Building, first developed in the late 1950s outside of Budapest, imagined a linear structure the size of a city. After moving to Switzerland, Zalotay continued the same line of thought under very different conditions in the house he built himself in Ziegelried near Bern – conceived as a minimal unit of the much larger system. What connects these apparently contradictory projects is an unwavering belief that architecture could serve society.
A Work Rediscovered
Manic Modern is the first comprehensive monograph on Zalotay. With essays, project texts, photographs, drawings, a dictionary and a complete catalogue of works, the book unfolds his extraordinary universe of ideas and images. Much of the archival material is published here for the first time. The publication places Zalotay within the architectural, social and political debates of his time while also asking why so many of his concerns suddenly feel contemporary again: housing for all, ecological responsibility, economical construction and forms of collective building.
For the three editors – Tibor Joanelly, Monika Annen and Marco Walser – the book grew out of a close collaboration over several years. What began as an encounter with a difficult-to-classify architect and an overwhelming body of work gradually became something more personal: the attempt to understand a position that had been unjustly marginalised and to put it back up for discussion. The title Manic Modern points to the passionate, at times obsessive side of modernism that Zalotay embodied – the conviction that even the most extreme architectural ideas had to remain technically conceivable and, ultimately, buildable. His drawings alone form a vast and highly distinctive visual world; the archive contains hundreds of plans, perspectives and prints.
Contributors and Collaborations
The book brings together authors, researchers, photographers and collaborators from Hungary and Switzerland. In Budapest, the archive assembled and preserved by Bálint Nagy provided an essential basis for the research, with Júlia Őry contributing both as an author and through her close engagement with Zalotay’s legacy. Paradigma Ariadné documented Zalotay’s surviving buildings in Hungary in a new photographic essay. The Swiss contributions include essays by architects and scholars as well as photographic work by renowned photographers such as Katalin Deér, Susana Bruell, Hans-Peter Siffert and Alexander Gempeler, documenting Zalotay’s extraordinary house in Ziegelried across several decades.
Back to Budapest
The Budapest launch will bring the book back to one of the places from which Zalotay’s story began. Following short contributions on the publication and on Zalotay’s position in Hungarian architectural history, Júlia Őry, Dániel Kovács and Tibor Joanelly will discuss the making of the book, the situation of architectural archives and the fascination of approaching a work that has remained difficult to categorise.
Friday, 30 October 2026, 18:00
MÉSZ – Kós Károly Terem
Ötpacsirta utca 2, Budapest
The event is kindly supported by the Swiss Embassy in Budapest
The book will be published by Park Books, Zurich.
Link: https://www.park-books.com/produkt/manic-modern-elemer-zalotay/1773
Contact:
Manic Modern
Tibor Joanelly, Monika Annen & Marco Walser
Bernerstrasse Nord 180, 8064 Zürich
[email protected]
mobile: Monika Annen +41 76 370 55 34 Tibor Joanelly +41 79 372 76 54,
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Event venue
Ötpacsirta utca 2, Budapest, Hungary, 1088
Tickets
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