For three years in the early 1980s, the Hungarian architect László Rajk ran a robust samizdat operation out of his home office in Budapest. With collaborator Gábor Demszky, Rajk issued literature, political commentary, and prison memoirs under the aegis AB Independent Press and sold them, along with other banned publications, out of the same space, named the Rajk Boutique. The project was cutting-edge in its use of a new printing technique, ramka, that Rajk learned from Polish samizdaters he’d met under the auspices of “research trips,” which combined mimeograph and silkscreen. Dozens of titles were published before a raid curtailed its activities in 1983. The raid was far from unexpected, aside from how long it took the authorities to get around to it. “There was an open house on Tuesday evenings, announced on Radio Free Europe,” Rajk told a reporter in 2014. “Everybody knew.”
A commitment to subversive speech characterized the life of this seemingly fearless figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, who died in 2019 after a short illness. Internationally, he is best known as the accomplished and tireless production designer of films such as László Nemes’s Son of Saul and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. But in his home country, Rajk’s legacy is decidedly political. His father was executed in a Stalinist show trial in 1949, just nine months after Rajk was born; the son subsequently became an outspoken critic of Hungary’s Communist regime. In the 1980s, he helped found the Alliance of Free Democrats, a group instrumental to Communism’s 1989 fall, and then served under its logo as a parliamentarian from 1990 to 1996. (He designed the logo, too.) At the time of his death, he was actively engaged in the student protests at the prestigious University of Theatre and Film Arts—where he taught for over thirty years—against Viktor Orbán’s conservative takeover of Hungary’s spaces of higher education. Somewhere in all this he also made buildings. Rajk’s most significant architectural work is Budapest’s Lehel Market Hall, an ecstatic deconstructivist experiment completed in 2002: think Richard Rogers’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon, punched in Kid Pix.
Rajk occasionally taught and lectured in the US, but his work is little known here. A recent exhibition at New York’s Valerie Goodman Gallery, Staging Future Worlds, took up the daunting mantle of being Rajk’s first North American solo show. How could such a summary-defying oeuvre—its unwieldy contours formed through constant, exuberant battle with an ideologically unstable authoritarian state—be made legible to an unfamiliar public? Mounted in a single, cavernous room in the gallery’s Yorkville space, the show sensibly limited its focus to Rajk’s output from 1980 to 1990, when his art and politics were most indistinguishable from each other. Rajk was blacklisted for most of this decade, and therefore unable to pursue conventional architectural commissions under his own name. Instead, he went in every other conceivable direction. Staging Future Worlds gathered original work and ephemera from his many activities during this period, including paper architecture, built projects surreptitiously undertaken in other countries, his nascent involvement in electoral politics, and, of course, samizdat. The breadth of work was astonishing. So, too, was the tender familiarity—neither slick nor casual—with which the exhibition was constructed; the curatorial team knew Rajk personally.
Tangibly present love is not a familiar feeling at most architectural exhibitions, so often vacuum-sealed against the contamination of affect. But love, in its magnanimity, sometimes leaves stones unturned. The curatorial text did not mention that the death of Rajk’s father was not a routine state murder: prior to his purging, László Rajk Sr. was a high-ranking Communist official instrumental in establishing Hungary’s secret police. Nor did it share that László Jr. was subsequently placed in an orphanage while his mother served a five-year prison sentence, nor that his name was changed by the state no less than four times in his early years. When Rajk and his mother were reunited, they became involved in Imre Nagy’s briefly successful but eventually bloody Hungarian Revolution of 1956; a photograph of them at László Sr.’s honorary reburial, a pivotal moment leading up to the revolution, is one of the more famous images of this period, supposedly still printed in most of the country’s history textbooks. But Rajk rejected the possibility that these traumatic events of his early years had shaped his worldview. “I have learned to live and deal with this condition early enough to overcome it, remaining alive and sane,” he said in a 1986 interview with Dissent. “And I don’t necessarily see a parallel between my childhood and the developments of my adult life.” Rather, his decision to become an outspoken member of the pro-democracy opposition movement in the 1980s “stem[med] from my adult experience. I have a peculiar occupation—I am an architect. And so, in my work, I am confronted quite directly with a lot of the social and cultural injustices that exist not only in Hungary but throughout the world.” He maintained remarkable stamina for responding to such confrontations even after democracy came to Hungary, becoming a visible thorn in the side of Orbán, his former agitator-in-arms, whose steep descent into ethonationalism earned him, in 2022, a fourth round as prime minister.
It appears to have been the time at hand, not some abstract future, that most concerned Rajk. He repeatedly activated the vast possibilities of the present by invoking collective recall—though never long enough for the memories to assume their full weight.
Whether Rajk’s biography was highly edited in an attempt to honor his own creation narrative, to let the work stand on its own, or to create a smoother image of him for prospective collectors, Staging Future Worlds failed to provide the context this visitor needed to locate Rajk himself in the flurry of work. It also sidestepped the opportunity to pull out his contradictions. In this particular way, the exhibition felt like any other architecture show these days—full of revolutionary ideals but devoid of the deeply felt stakes that anchor political commitment.
Tellingly, the most electrifying works in the midsize show were the most autobiographical. In 1988, on the request of a group of Hungarian émigrés, Rajk traveled to Paris to design a monument to the martyrs of the 1956 revolution at Père Lachaise Cemetery. While in the French capital he made five strange little drawings at the city’s Apple headquarters, having been invited to mess around with the company’s new digital rendering technologies. Four of them link French and Hungarian anti-totalitarian struggle in vignettes of a pixelated ’80s fantasyland: in one, hunky figures in Jazzercise outfits take a ride in a Constructivist caboose emblazoned with the dates “1789/1989,” their hair breezing behind them in the winds of change. The compositions are sophisticated but the lines are messy, fast, real. The final drawing was unlike not just the others but also anything else in the exhibition. There is no political messaging: just a carefully framed first-person view from inside the Apple headquarters of a scraggly young tree coated in spring. In the foreground, an early Mac sits on a blood-red desk; on its screen, a mise en abyme. The banal, disquieting scene stretches into infinity, omnipresent yet beyond the reach of memory.
Rajk made this sketch while conceptualizing a memorial to a movement spurred by the reinterment of his father’s remains, a movement whose failure led to the execution of Nagy and a period of exile from Hungary for Rajk and his mother. The fortieth anniversary of his father’s death was approaching; his mother had died a few years prior; Nagy’s body still lay in an unmarked grave in Budapest, due to lingering injunctions against a rehabilitative state funeral. The resultant design, an eight-foot steel ship dashed against a bed of jagged stones and skewered by the Hungarian flag, was the first of around a dozen memorial spaces Rajk would create over his remaining three decades. Just one year later, in 1989, he designed the stage set for the highly public reburial of Nagy and other martyrs of 1956, which precipitated the dissolution of Communism in Hungary. (Within months, he also re-reburied his father … an unusual event, to say the least.) I hear the narrator of Sans Soleil—the product of another biography-averse and memory-obsessed leftist filmmaker, Chris Marker—in my ear: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
Staging Future Worlds would have revealed more about Rajk and his dogged pursuit of freedom through form if it had interrogated his use of memory as a political wedge to change the present. For it appears to have been the time at hand, not some abstract future, that most concerned Rajk. (Sans Soleil again: the secret that people “are not on a launching pad toward real life, but they are life, to be eaten on the spot, like fresh doughnuts.”) He repeatedly activated the vast possibilities of the present by invoking collective recall—though never long enough for the memories to assume their full weight. In his later years, when asked by a group of students how it felt for his painstakingly constructed movie sets to be simply garbaged after filming ended, he said, “It’s a great feeling. Exhilarating!”