Born in Hungary in the 1920s, Antti Lovag took his first course of Naval Architecture in Stockholm Sweden. After this, he moved for his studies to Paris France. In the early 1960s he began to consider a radically different architecture, along with Jacques Couelle, and was inspired by the forms of nature to imagine a more natural home in harmony with human morphology.
Lovag views architecture as a "form of play-spontaneous, joyful, full of surprise."
"Whether for economic reasons or lack of technical solutions, human beings have confined themselves to cubes full of dead ends and angles that impede our movement and break our harmony," explains Lovag. To him, the straight line is "an aggression against nature," human nature to be more specific.
Lovag's point is that the motion of our arms and legs throughout space trace circles, similar to a circular field of vision. "Conviviality is a circular phenomenon. The circle structures the way human life is carried out." He explored this idea throughout his career, building prototypes and experimental structures that reflected his theories on the human body and its occupation of space.
Another reason why the circle is so present in his architecture is because it "is the simplest construction; it has just one dimension, the radius." This is unsurprisingly transformed into the three dimensional sphere, which is the lightest, strongest, most material-efficient form of them all.
Lovag's radical spherical building block is a foil to the known rules of architecture and the known conventions of the standard orthogonal system.
Although his work is admired by many, Lovag does not have a long list of clients. This may have something to do with his philosophy, three conditions he respects; "I don't know what it's going to be like, I don't know when it's going to be finished, and I don't know how much it's going to cost."
Lovag is not in the field for the money, but instead to pursue his passions in understanding architecture and the human body. Currently 90 years old, Lovag is still designing as he continues to study the nature of Man.
