About the architect…
Nathalie Grekofski
The house was designed by Nathalie Grekofski, a Belgian architect living in Hungary.
I met Nathalie for the first time in Esztergom, when she gave a small lecture in Hungarian to a group of French friends at the Tár Lak salon about Imre Makovecz and organic architecture. I still remember the details of her lecture to this day.
Organic architecture
We learned that organic architecture aims to bring buildings as close to nature as possible and to use as much as possible local building materials and architectural traditions, all with a modern eye. She showed us a building over a waterfall, which she said was one of her favourite organic buildings.
She also told us that Imre Makovecz was very fond of concrete, and was convinced that much more could be made of this material, as it was excellent for sculptural building elements. Makovecz used wood not so much because it was his favourite material, but mainly because it was cheaper than concrete.
The orange experiment
The orange experiment, in which she peeled an orange in a spiral to flatten the spherical skin of the Mediterranean fruit, is still in my mind’s eye. The transformation of a spherical shape into a plane lead to the so-called fence element, so often seen on Hungarian doorways, especially in Transylvania. She learned this from the “master” Imre Makovecz, with whom she worked for several years.
At the end of the lecture I asked Nathalie if she herself practised this type of architecture, if she embraced these principles? After she said yes, my next question was whether she would like to take on the design of a house in Transylvania. He was open to this project and so began the story of the building of the present Bethlen Apartment.
The soul of the building
Nathalie is convinced that every building has a soul and should be seen as a living being, because it is not by chance that traditional Hungarian architecture uses these terms: eyebrow tree, window eye, door or window sash, facade, plinth, basement throat, roof ridge. He called his house plans Gyermek. “Let us look at the child!” – he said as we opened up the blueprints to talk through some of the details.
Thanks to my husband
The story of the house’s construction was full of adventures, but we had pleasant surprises we hadn’t expected. Such pleasant surprises were the carpenters from Szeklerland and our masons from Chombord. A lot of young people from Romania have emigrated to the West for better earnings and it is really very difficult to find suitable professionals for any kind of work. My husband and I stood there with the beautiful plans and we did not know who would be able to do it all. And my husband said, “You women have thought this out well, but how am I going to build this?”
