LAJOS KOZMA
Lajos Kozma (b. 1884 – d. 1948) was an architect and designer of the Hungarian Art Nouveau movement in the early 20th century. He had an unprecedented influence on European design through his drawings, buildings and furniture. Kozma studied architecture at the Imperial Joseph College. In 1909–1910 he won a scholarship to Paris, where he learned painting from Henri Matisse.
After graduating from college he joined “The Young Ones,” a group of architects influenced by the Secessionist movement; they studied Hungarian folk art and local architecture by travelling in Hungary and Transylvania. Kozma apprenticed with the famous architect Béla Lajta. During this period, Kozma became famous for designing the interior of Lajta's Rózsavölgyi bookstore in which glass panels separated sections of the shop which was well known for its heavy, carved wood ornamentation, reminiscent of Biedermeier design.
In 1913, Kozma founded the Budapest Workshop following the Viennese model of the Wiener Werkstatte with the aim of providing functional high design for homes and offices; from the structure of the buildings down to every aspect of the interiors — furniture to floor coverings and lamps. This was meant to appeal to Budapest’s rising middle class. Kozma’s take on baroque-style furniture came to be known as Kozma-baroque and featured what today would be considered postmodern references to Hungarian folk art motifs, mixing luxurious traditional woods and materials in unexpected ways.
At the end of World War I the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to an end, and after the short reign of the Béla Kun communist government, Hungary became increasingly conservative under the right-wing Horthy government that followed. Kozma, for his part, designed stores including a well-known pharmacy, a department store and a movie theater, as well as a few apartment buildings and even the Kassa Synagogue.
In the 1930's, Kozma designed several villas in the hills of Buda. It was in these homes — where he designed both the structures and all interiors, from the floor coverings to the fixtures to the type of glass used in the windows — that he did some of his finest work. He partnered with the furniture company Heisler creating game tables with chairs, desk chairs, bars and a secretary, as well as his gorgeous club chairs.
By 1938, Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws stripped Kozma of his membership in the Chamber of Architects as well as his license to work. Kozma responded by writing a book of his architectural principles, illustrated by his work, “The New House,” which was published in Switzerland in 1941.
Once the Nazis invaded Hungary Kozma went into hiding with false papers. Surviving the war, he was reinstated as an architect, received his first public commission for a school, joined the editorial board of a modernist architecture journal Új Épitészet (New Architecture) and was appointed both as a director of the School for Applied Arts and a professor in the School of Architecture at Budapest Technical University. Unfortunately, before the school’s new building opened in 1948, Kozma died at age 6
