Pierre Székély

Pierre Székély, sculptor and architect: born Budapest 11 June 1923; married (two sons, one daughter); died Paris 3 April 2001.

Pierre Székély, sculptor and architect: born Budapest 11 June 1923; married (two sons, one daughter); died Paris 3 April 2001.

Thanks to the tides of fashion an entire architectural avant-garde has been rescued from the dustbin of history, namely those experimental plasticians whose biomorphic forms blossomed in the 1970s.

Pierre Székély exemplified this cycle of neglect and revival. As a self-proclaimed "sculptor", rather than architect, his built environments and habitable structures had fallen into disrepair along with his reputation. Rescued by the Wallpaper* magazine effect and widespread fascination with space-age design, Székély recently joined the Centre Pompidou collection and starred in an exhibition, "Research Architecture", in New York.

The man himself, a slight, polite dandy, continued to dress in a sci-fi jumpsuit look which made his appearances at academic conferences and museum panels all the more appreciated. The remaining buildings and large-scale sculptures of Székély have a dramatic flair quite apart from their nostalgic embodiment of a vanished Utopian ideal. Indeed they seem direct precursors of today's most radical architectural forms, now created from advanced computer programs rather than the handworked sketches and plaster models of Székély's atelier.

Born in 1923 in Budapest, Székély was precociously fascinated by tactile materials and detailed construction. Later he founded the European Institute of Granite Technology. He was imprisoned in a work camp in 1944 and escaping a deportation train spent the rest of the Second World War in hiding in Budapest. In 1946 he moved to France and began working on large organic sculptures that owed something to Dubuffet's environments and maybe the curves of Gaudí.

In 1952-53, along with his potter wife Vera and the painter André Borderie, he designed a house, Le Bateau Ivre, in the Isère. He said,

Being at the cutting edge of the avant-garde Fred and Monique Gelas thought we three artists might make a better job of designing their house than a professional architect. I know of no other client who would have entrusted the creation of a new architectural form to artists. Being a sculptor it was incumbent upon me to design the plan and the elevations simultaneously.

These beautiful plans could as well be abstract painting or choreography as conceptual architecture. He said:

It struck me that snails were several million years ahead of man in their building methods and it was high time we caught up with them. In the middle of this century, aged 30, I was given the opportunity to launch "architecture-sculpture", which has since become characteristic of our epoch, with its hunger for symbiosis.

In 1953 Székély created a sculptural intervention in Paris at Rue du Docteur Blanche and that same year was a winner in a competition organised by the group Espace. By 1955 he had moved permanently to Marcoussis, in the Ile de France outside Paris, and had his first exhibitions. His first " sculpture practicable" for children was built in 1957 at Petit-Clamart. Then in 1962 he joined forces with the young architect François Bride to create an extraordinary 1,000-seat multi-denominational " Cité Spirituelle" for the town of Rheims:

The proposed architectural forms, tinted concrete sprayed on to wire mesh, would have sprung direct from the ground and risen smooth and unbroken between earth and sky . . . The day I took the clay maquette to the kiln for firing, it slipped out of my hands and smashed into a thousand pieces on the studio floor. So I put the pieces in the kiln, fired them at 1,000 degrees and fitted them together afterwards. The maquette made 35 years ago seems to become more and more contemporary. Perhaps, by the next century, it will not be premature any more.

Indeed the maquette of this unbuilt project was bought by the FRAC Orléans and subsequently exhibited and published around the world.

Continually pushing engineering-artisanal frontiers, Székély designed a flying sculpture for Monaco and in 1965 created a groundbreaking leisure-culture village in Brittany. That year the Congrès de l'Union Internationale des Architectes in Paris exhibited his improbable project for a satellite in orbit, the " Cité aérienne".

As a sculptor working on the scale of a town planner or urbanist Székély continued to create monumental works. Monument to Peace was donated to his native Budapest in 1983 whilst L'Oiseau Impossible was given as a present by President François Mitterrand to Menachem Begin.

Székély was honoured with a Paris retrospective at the Hôtel de la Monnaie in 1982 and there are two open-air museums dedicated to his work, at Pecs in Hungary and Segikahara in Japan, a country where he remained continually modish. Székély said: "What I enjoy is creating Utopia in real time."

Adrian Dannatt