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All Saints Church

Budapest, Hungary
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The Roman Catholic Parish Church of the Budapest-Farkasret area stands on the hilly Buda side of the capital, right across the main entrance of the Farkasret cemetery. Sculptural forms of the facade clearly show the public and sacral character. The building mass is split into two parts: the smaller lobby with the main entrance, which together with its protruding wings also acts as a vertical sign for the building, and the nave with a triangular section of the baptistery stepping forward from the facade. As building church towers was prohibited at the time, the bells were placed on a concrete beam connecting the entrance hall and the nave.

The project was permitted as a reconstruction and extension, but in fact a completely new building was erected on the basement walls of its predecessor. The whole building is constructed of prefab slab elements, used as bricks, having a hollow core filled with concrete. Szabo chose to use this widely available construction material because of the financial constraints, as the whole project was financed by donations. As construction leader, he also had to count with the fact that the building was mostly erected by volunteer work of the parish members and community groups.Szabo also designed the interior and the furniture. Spectacular pieces of his artistry are the tabernacle's red glass door and the embossed copper plate wall sculptures. The main sights of the interior are, however, the floor-to-ceiling glued glass windows. On these, Szabo, who had started sculpting in the 1950s using found materials, worked for more than a decade, and finished the last piece in 1988, just weeks before his death. The semi-abstract windows with their carefully chosen colors brighten up the interior, dominated by the visible construction materials.

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dkovacs, March 20th, 2019
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