Landscape and region: formation of the regional concept and its landscape aspects in the history of Balaton development

Abstract

Imre Ormos introduced the Balaton Regional PLan in 1966 on the 10th IFLA congress. His presentation was titled "Landscape architecture contribution to environmental rearrangement, and he highlighted it as a perfect example a large-scale landscape design.1 The leader of the UIA Abercombie award winner design project was a member of Urban Planning Enterprise (VÁTERV), an urban and regional designer architect, Tibor Farkas.2 Imre Ormos, a representative of the Horticulture College, also joined the project, and played a defining role in establishing the methodology for regional landscape planning. He had started to draft the landscape layout section well before the planning operation co-ordinated by Farkas in the National Development Bureau, and the Balaton landscape design plan which deals with the lake from a single perspective is attributed to his name in part. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct lake development technical and theoretical background from a historical point of view by introducing primarily the roles of architects, city engineers and land architects/designers. Resources help us introduce the relationship between landscape and region concept, as well as we get a chance to have an insight into the urban and architecture processes of regional strategy creation. Problem analysis of early mass tourism indicates a trend which connects the development with the rehabilitation, and this trend required the establishment of landscape tools as well the reorganisation of technical positions. In the Ormos archives stored3 in Entz Ferenc Library of Szent István University, one can find the original 1963 version of "20 year development plan – Balaton". The author added some hand-written notes to this document, and4 strongly criticised contradicting ratios of green area development and lake shore filling, and as such forecasting the risk embedded in modernisation. His early criticism showed in time the tensions which started to surface from the mid-sixties due to the ambivalent nature of the development. Having the current regional trends in view, it is worth examining the scale change taking place in the wake of holiday resort urbanisation, i.e. a genesis of regionality, and then its changes, the emergence of landscape design concept in the tools for architecture, urbanism and landscape formation. The concept of the landscape was first defined by Mihály Mőcsényi in 1968. Previously, this concept was used differently by a whole variety of disciplines, more often than not as a synonym of "region"." In the initial phase of Hungarian regional planning, Balaton and other geographic area related tasks are often mentioned as "small landscape" assignments, even though these design tools did not even have any landscape design or nature protection intentions." Simultaneously, "landscape formation" appeared as a recurring item in his architecture and urban planning practice, with special emphasis on holiday resorts, albeit "landscape" instruments were not defined by plan publishers." In the above cases, the landscape appeared as a supplementary concept, in fact, as a contradiction to the best practice of the industrial and urban planning processes. Urbanisation of holiday resorts plastically illustrates the problems stemming from the breakaway from conventional urban contours and from the lack of morphology and historical context where the nature providing recreational options is essentially considered by the designers as a visual element, and was used a medium between different scale levels. Spectacle-oriented approach brought along the problem of subjective imaging and interpretation as well. The undifferentiated nature of contemporary literature further amplified the problem. In this publication we examine the landscape concept in parallel with its historic background, and we will acknowledge, that the content of this document is a result of a conceptual development with some contradictions here and there. In this genealogy, Balaton development tasks and intensifying ecology problems served as significant inspiration to further large-scale green area planning and the formation of Hungarian landscape design.