In modern design, not many blur the fine line between architecture and art better than Hungarian multidisciplinary designer Gábor Városi. Instead of buildings as static containers, Városi imagines buildings as luminous sculptural environments—spaces for which glass, geometry, and daylight blend into everyday experiences changing with daylight hours. His thinking is deceptively simple yet fundamentally revolutionary: architecture should not only contain life but become life itself. As he describes it, every building is a “living sculpture” with practical use and expressive capability.
This belief has defined Városi’s career for more than a decade. Since the debut of his Shambala Home in 2008, he has steadily advanced an approach to architecture where light is not just an accessory, but a primary building material. The house’s sweeping glass walls and curved windows transform sunlight into a design element, bending and refracting it into ever-changing compositions across interior spaces. What might otherwise be ordinary moments—sunrise pouring into a bedroom, the shifting afternoon glow in a kitchen—become immersive artistic experiences. Városi does not simply design rooms; he designs atmospheres that evolve and breathe with their surroundings.
That route into architecture, though, started with paint. At the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as an undergraduate student, Városi studied with renowned painter Ignác Kokas whose abstract landscapes made a huge impression upon his artistic evolution. Kokas’s focus on color, geometry, and expressively loose brushwork helped him learn how to use form to conjure up an emotional response, a lesson that would later translate itself into his architectural practice. Though Városi still paints in an abstract expressionist mode, his real epiphany occurred when he started viewing architecture itself as an extension of painting. Rather than paint upon canvas, he started to work in glass and steel, viewing walls as a canvas for light upon which to play, much as color once had upon canvas.
Mentorship also defined his course. The father of Op art, Victor Vasarely, opened Városi’s Paris show in 1987, providing support that is still one of Városi’s fondest recollections. He frequently remembers Vasarely’s graciousness when he met with the artist in Gord, as Vasarely pulled up in a humble car, even though he was globally renowned, a display which, for Városi, symbolized best the spirit of art without pretention. That selflessness, tied in with Vasarely’s own multi-disciplinary legacy, furthered Városi’s conviction that artists at their best produce works when they insist on not belonging to a specific medium. The results of that philosophy are visible in his architectural portfolio. The Art Home, completed in 2013 in Budapest’s Svábhegy district, embodies his vision of organic architecture. Designed to resemble a bird’s nest cradling expansive glass windows, the residence situates its two-story apartments in a structure that feels simultaneously protective and open. Nature and architecture are not in conflict here but are instead entwined, with greenery seeping into the living experience through glass walls that dissolve the boundary between inside and outside. His more recent Poet’s Garden Villas expand this approach into a larger community, integrating 12 apartments with Japanese gardens and 50 glass sculptures. Each sculpture reflects his signature blend of geometric abstraction and sensual humanlike forms, turning the grounds into a constantly shifting gallery. Residents do not just live within buildings; they inhabit an ecosystem of art and design where beauty is interwoven with everyday life.
Though based in Budapest, Városi is increasingly gazing in other directions. He has outlined plans to hold exhibitions and take on commissions in the United States, where he is keen to introduce his philosophy of architecture as living sculpture for a whole new set of eyes. He is set to make a first-time appearance at ART Market with works involving his “light paintings,” a technique that employs refracted and distorted light as an evocative medium in much the same vein as a painter uses oils or acrylic. Neither for his own aggrandizement, he says, but rather for instructing others in perceiving in light itself a medium of elegance. Despite it all, Városi is dedicated to an ethos of modesty and magnanimity. He refuses to regard his work as a form of self-promotion but rather as a sharing of beauty. “The most important thing,” he says, “is to communicate what we perceive as beautiful, and explain why it matters.”