Beyond the Cube Houses

The paper presents the images of Hungarian village in 80s, through the theme of “cube house”, on the occasion of an exhibition. The exhibition material consists of the rural photo corpus of The Patriotic People’s Front (Hazafias Népfront), that contains nearly 100.000 shootings, from almost all over counties of Hungary, mainly from smaller villages. The basic thesis of the study is that, classic categories of architectural history are not applicable in Hungarian village, as well as these terms can only be used as a reference point. That’s why the interpretation of the 80s demands a different periodization than the older modern–postmodern (and the organic architecture in it) concepts would suggest. So we can talk about a “post-cube” era, otherwise the period of “tüzépbarokk”. Furthermore the paper presents the material of the mentioned exhibition from autumn 2022, organized by the author. The tableaus show photos from the Hungarian villages from the 80s, and literary quotations are also included in the exhibition from Panorama (Körkép) anthologies, with the help of which the viewer/reader can interpret the rural landscape more deeply.