Gallery: The Amazing Art on These Communist-Era Houses Was a Rebellion Back Then
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*Hungarian Cubes*, by photographer Katharina Roters, documents the post-communist era homes in the Hungarian countryside.
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The period in time was known as “Goulash Communism," a sort of relaxed strain of communism.
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János Kádár, who presided over Hungary, was more tolerant of public dissent.
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It’s fitting, then, that during the Goulash Communism era, a peculiar architectural trend took off: People started painting the facades of their houses with abstract shapes, in wild shades of color.
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Roters noticed the painted “Magyar Kocka”, or Hungarian Cube, houses in 2003 after moving from Germany to a small Hungarian town.
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Some homes have beach house-like decorations...
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...others have trompe l’oeil paintings around the window, like facsimiles of shutters or trimming...
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...and others have abstracted paintings of sunlight.
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Communist architecture dictated that city blocks be filled with square, economical row houses.
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They were designed for efficiency, meaning every house was the same, and every house was boring.
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“Today you can buy a car you like, you can do everything you like. In this uniform world where people were not allowed to have some individuality, you had to wait for the same car as your neighbor,” Roters says.
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“The facade is what I can show to the outside to the world. This was a free space at this time where the people can show and express their individuality.”
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The houses are a relic of some rare individualism during a time of homogeneous, community-centric thinking.
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Hungarian Cubes is available through Park Books.
