Pen Zen Diaries

About the Book

From among my many preserved complete design processes, these two volumes contain only six of them. To legitimize both the contents and the method, I found it important to (re)publish all six united so they create a new process of their own. The gradual development of ideas, to reach the state of physical reality, begins with hesitant decisions, a possible drawn existence out of the many options. All the projects are large urban ensembles, symphonies in musical terms. Where to find the melody and the harmony of the parts are the almost unresolvable but most challenging tasks of an architect! He/She plays a double role—the creator and the user/critic. In these cases, many people will be exposed to, enjoy, or suffer from those decisions. As mentioned, the gradual thought-condensing process has to have several testing phases by our sensory perceptions. From these, only the seeing and somewhat the touching aspects are revealed by the drawings, the others we have to substitute in our imagination. With hundreds of these control substations, hopefully we could avoid offending individualistic solutions, especially if—as this method allows it—the representatives of the users have the chance to express their opinions of the proposals under way. The public responds to these architectural explorations and, in one case, to the constructed result, speaks for their validity.

About the Author

Dr. Peter Magyar, between 1989 and 2011, served as Director of the Schools of Architecture in three American universities. He holds a Master of Architecture and a Doctor of Architecture degree, issued by The Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. He was teaching, lecturing and practicing internationally, designed large urban ensembles, some of them are constructed. He authored several books about his projects, and in 2011 he won the Pro Architectura Hungarica Medal. In 2015 he became a Member of The Hungarian Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected to Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2016 and was selected as finalist at the World Architecture Festival in 2017 and 2018.