In a photo essay on Dezeen, German-Hungarian artist Katharina Roters documents what's known as the "Magyar Kocka" or "Hungarian Cube," a type of standardized single-story dwelling found throughout Hungary's towns and suburbs that's closely linked to the country's communist past. (It's also nicknamed the "Kadar cube," after communist leader János Kádár.) According to Roters, these uniformly constructed gabled boxes quickly came to inspire a "mixture of disregard and hostility" among Hungarians, but by turning them into canvases for a specific kind of bright, geometric abstract artwork, residents have used them to "point a way out of the vacuum of alienation."
Roters has collected her photographs—which she started taking in 2003, after she moving to a small Hungarian town and being struck by the "absurd beauty" of these dwellings—in a recent book that includes essays on various aspects of the phenomenon. For her final compositions, Roters digitally removed power cables, tree branches, satellite dishes, and the like to highlight how their ornamentation offers "a rare opportunity for individualism and even protest under the conformity of the communist system." Head to Dezeen for more of her work.
· Hungarian Cubes: the houses of post-war communism photographed by Katharina Roters [Dezeen]
· Hungarian Cubes [Park Books]