The Emergence of Regional Scale: Lake Balaton Conceptualizations by the Architect-Ethnographer János Tóth (1936–46)

The processes of landscape urbanization made new scales of planning necessary in the first half of the century. In the history of the Hungarian architectural profession, the largest lake region in Central Europe, Lake Balaton, served as an experimental territory in issues of settlement and landscape-scale planning. The study analyzes this historical process, during which the scale of architectural design increasingly expanded, and architects began to deal with the scale of landscape. The focus of the study is the work of János Tóth, who developed the first regional concept in 1946. This turning point in the professional history had previously appeared less in the focus of scientific thinking, but at the same time it represented an important step in the change of scale of planning and prepared the later, internationally recognized regional plan. The study outlines the process of professional differentiation and points to the knowledge transfer and interaction between professional fields in regional planning. By comparing regional concepts, the different positions and approaches become visible between architecture, urban design and regional planning, as well as the gradual rise of the ethnographic and ecological perspectives.