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5 organicist Modern and super-natural organicism the idealofmodern,urbanapartmentlivingwas,almostfromthestart,complemented by ownership of a summer cottage (nyaraló) or weekend getaway (hétvégi ház), sometimes called a víkend ház.1 in the early 1960s, the state amended the “one-family, one-house” rule to allow additional ownership of a small, unheated cottage on a plot of land. such cottages could not be used as a permanent home address and, unlike the primary residence, were subject to a small property tax. Members of Dunaújváros’s professional class acquired tiny summer cottages by lake Balaton or little weekend houses near the Danube, where Budapest’s gentry used to have summer villas. some had plumbing, others only an outhouse. Many working-class city dwellers bought vegetable plots further from the river as a source of extra cash or to supplement their household diets. These “hobby gardens ” (hobbi kert) might have a tiny cottage on them, but just as often they had only a toolshed and some cooking utensils. numerous publications offered advice for cottage owners, and even Lakáskult úra featured sections on how to build and decorate these new spaces. As the jacket blurb on a book published in 1972 explains: “urban living circumstances, increasing noise and smog, crowded environment, the effects of various ‘stresses’ make a person’s desire for nature unavoidable. . . . it is necessary to fulfill the city dweller’s most important aspiration: to escape from the city’s everyday life into the natural environment” (callmeyer and rojkó 1972:201). This recreational and therapeutic appreciation of nature was a far cry from village life, and indeed, the land set aside for such structures was called a “resort area” (üdülőterület) and was zoned to prohibit the keeping of poultry and livestock. The cover illustration of the book on weekend houses (Plate 1a) epitomized this officially sanctioned ideal: a futuristic rectangle of concrete resembling a giant 1970s television, built on pylons to house the family car beneath. it is no accident that this futuristic cottage is represented by an illustration rather than a photograph. The editors would have been hard pressed to find a real holiday cottage that resembled it.2 The vernacular aesthetic that dominated cottage building and decorating was not complementary to modern urban materialities , as suggested by the illustration, but rose in opposition to them. it became an integral part of a widely shared aesthetic opposed to socialist generic, one which sought to restore the “natural” relationship of human beings to productive ac139 140 | Politics in color and concrete tivity, to autonomy, and to national belonging. This organicist Modern aesthetic, epitomized in natural materials and folk forms, was brought into urban apartments all over hungary, deployed against an alienating socialist generic. it was not a return to a premodernist traditionalism of either peasant life or bourgeois materialities, but a way of generating a more “harmonious” modern lifestyle that fulfilled some of the dreams of a socialist modernity. Because organicist Modern emerged in a dynamic relationship with socialist Modern—in harmony with some of its aspirations but opposed to a socialist generic —it spanned the last three decades of state socialism and continued to structure political dispositions in the 1990s. from the mid-1960s through the upheaval of socialist economic reforms in the 1980s and into the 1990s after the fall of state socialism, variations on this aesthetic became widespread across social strata, in both urban and rural areas. Just as the emergence of socialist generic was a shared phenomenon, an affection for organicist Modern, especially for the home, also transcended social divisions. This value-saturated aesthetic regime shaped definitions of materialities that qualified as “normal,” namely those in which particular qualities were aligned with anticommunist, national, and market economic sentiments . with the retreat of the welfare state in the 1990s, widespread disillusion with the lived experience of democratic politics and capitalism was offset by the promises that such organicist materialities continued to hold out. only now, such “natural” materials were increasingly to be found in the form of high-end, technologically enhanced commodities, commodities that transformed the doit -yourself qualities of organicist Modern into a super-natural organicism. Organicist Modern Out of Socialist Generic in earlier years, private efforts to create modern interiors had largely aligned with the modernizing interests of the state. As a growing urban population moved into modernist apartments built under state auspices, many readily adopted the prescribed furnishing style. But by the time the oPec...

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