THE TRIPARTITE HOUSE
One of the fundamental architectural formulae of the Carpathian Basin and within that the Tokaj-Hegyalja region is the tripartite residential building, named thus after the tripartite character of the floor plan, which is represented by the sequence of the ’clean room’ (a kind of parlour used for the display of furniture and various other objects), the kitchen and the pantry. Stretching in front of these rooms in the majority of cases is the porch with columns, or the wide eaves, which were not supported by columns.
This building type embodies a profound cultural pattern pointing far beyond itself, being far more than a simple layout that was determined by the available building technology and materials of the time. Ethnographic research after World War II typically restricted itself to the study of the physical characteristics of these buildings since the cultural policy of the period labelled the practice of attaching symbolism to the exterior and the interior as retrograde. In the meantime, as the traditional peasant lifestyle was gradually disappearing, so did folk architecture lose its original importance and meaning with its place taken by the standard designs of the cube houses of the Kádár era, which did not fit in with the character of Hungarian villages either in their mass-forming or their floor area layout and connection with their environment.
While Hungarian folk-art tradition has a unified spiritual/intellectual character, a distinction must be made in its study between tradition and heritage.
Heritage, or inheritance, can be interpreted as the objectified/material manifestation of tradition. Heritage can be researched, catalogued and exhibited in museums, but it will not necessarily help us to directly access tradition. Heritage can be used as a ’raw material’ by innovative artistic inspiration but tradition as a category of existence is (was) only accessible to communities.
The Hungarian folk architecture tradition – or rather heritage? – is known to most architects to the extent of its fundamental formula of the tripartite clean-room-kitchen-pantry layout, which they learned about during their formal education. Reality is far more exciting than this. The Hungarian people – regarding location, language and culture – are an inclusion on the borderline between the East and the West. The Hungarians’ interaction with either side has been changing in its intensity and it has only been for brief periods that a balance was found. It might not be an overstatement that Hungarians are the people of transition: hence the tripartite character of our folk architecture.
The study of the living spaces of a Hungarian village reveals that the first level of the tripartite concept is discernible in the use of the residential plots. On one side of this plot is a garden with flowers, which is like a showcase to the world. A message is sent to those passing by the house, i.e. to the village community, through the choice of flowers and even how well-looked-after the garden is.
The flowery garden is followed by the house, marking man’s place on the plot. Behind it was the farm-related area with the farm buildings, and then came the vegetable garden, the orchard, the vineyard and finally the pasture and the forest.
The above-mentioned tripartite structure of the clean room, the kitchen and the pantry follows the same idea: it carries extra meaning. Moreover, two other tripartite structures can be discovered in folk houses. A transitional space between the outside and the inside – a porch – is located along the other horizontal axis. The third tripartite aspect can be found along the vertical axis and is formed by the vaulted cellar, the ground level with the floor, the ceiling and the walls, and the triangular attic. These three basic geometrical shapes are interpreted virtually in the same way in universal cultural history: the semi-circular form symbolises the world under the ground; the square or rectangle is the place for man’s earthly existence, while the triangle standing on its base is the symbol of the transcendental dimension.
Compared with the bipolarity of Eastern thinking, this tripartite approach has a very important surplus: a prominent role is assigned to the centre, or, in general, the middle and the transition.
The centre of a tripartite house was the fireplace, i.e. the kitchen. Cooking was usually done on the small fireplace in the middle of the kitchen, above which was the free chimney, i.e. a huge vertical, gradually narrowing funnel, which vertically marked out the soul of the house: its middle. Between the kitchen and the entrance hall there was a wide, triumphant arch-like vaulting, reminiscent – perhaps not accidentally – of the vaulted openings in the walls of the sanctuaries in medieval churches.
The mostly unheated ‘back’ room, which could be accessed from the entrance hall (pitvar), was the pantry, which was used to store food and the women and children also slept here.
Two windows of the ’clean room’, situated on the street front, overlooked the street and one overlooked the garden, i.e. was facing south. This room – incredible for today’s readers – mainly had a sacred function. Besides serving as a space for storing the household’s most important goods (e.g. the dowry), the clean room was mostly used during festive days. This was the room where the children were born and also where the dead were laid out.
The columned porch of traditional Hungarian tripartite houses is a transitional space, which was typically used in the transitional seasons: in spring and autumn. (In winter people stayed inside the house and in summer they were mostly on the lands.) The columns were usually decorative: they had a pedestal and a capital, evocative of the ancient statues erected to the gods; moreover, in the Carpathian Basin grapevines were crawling up the columns, assigning yet another cultural historical meaning to this basic architectural element.
The unified culture of the Carpathian Basin, discussed above – albeit only fragmentarily – can be discovered in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region across a wide spectrum, while, thanks to the wealth that once characterised this region some prominent examples can also be seen. The basis of this culture – the single-storey, tripartite house – has been pushed into the background due to the changes in and the requirements of the contemporary lifestyle, and this is leading to an undesirable transformation in the image of the settlements. Although the attraction and image of the Tokaj-Hegyalja region are primarily defined by the ‘prominent buildings’, churches and mansions, discussed in the following chapter, the overwhelming majority of the buildings in this area is constituted by the Hungarian peasant house this chapter was devoted to.
Gábor Erhardt
Introduction from the book TOKAJ, the architecture of the wine region, 2022.