BRICK BY BRICK

LIGHT, VOLUME, SILENCE: THE EARLY WORK OF LÁSZLÓ TÓTH

JLOHOM JGAN

April 18, 2025

László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect whose modest buildings still resonate with quiet urgency, gradually faded into obscurity. Working in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia before World War II, Tóth crafted spaces defined by light, utility, and moral clarity. What survives today are not monuments, but structures shaped by care. They whisper a different story of modernism.

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Among the lesser-known names to emerge from the Bauhaus orbit in the 1930s, Tóth remains one of the most enigmatic. A student of Hannes Meyer and a sometime assistant to László Moholy-Nagy, Tóth belonged to a generation of architects who believed that form was a response not merely to function, but to history—and to its interruptions. His early buildings, completed between 1932 and 1938, are few, scattered, and often in ruin. Yet they possess a quiet, arresting clarity. Not heroic like Le Corbusier’s, not dogmatic like Walter Gropius’s, Tóth’s architecture speaks a different dialect of modernism—one that feels modest, melancholic, and fiercely committed to the dignity of use.

Tóth arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, during a period of mounting political scrutiny and institutional instability. By then, Gropius had stepped down (1928), Meyer was at the helm (1928–30), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe would soon take over (1930–32), each leaving their imprint on the school’s direction. Meyer’s rationalist, socially minded pedagogy deeply influenced Tóth’s conception of architecture as a form of ethical labor. Tóth was less interested in the theatrical geometries of expressionism and more drawn to what he once called “the grammar of shelter” in a 1933 letter to Moholy-Nagy. He had a quiet respect for Ludwig Hilberseimer, the celebrated German urbanist, and found in Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with light and shadow a kind of abstract poetics that would find architectural expression in his manipulation of windows and volumes.

Bauhaus students and masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building in Dessau (László Tóth is first from the right). Photo by Grete Stern, ca. 1930

By 1932, Tóth had returned to Hungary and begun taking modest commissions, largely for municipal and state-sponsored programs. That he was able to work as a Jewish architect in 1930s Hungary speaks to the brief and uneasy window that existed before the anti-Jewish laws of 1938 closed professional life to many. There is evidence that he also worked on small commissions in Bratislava and in Krakow during this period, often in association with leftist cooperatives or cultural associations connected to the Bauhaus diaspora. The first building commonly attributed to him is the Városmajor Workers’ Housing Complex in Budapest (1933–35).

Városmajor Workers’ Housing Complex, Budapest, during construction

Built for a railway cooperative, the low-rise development is composed of three elongated apartment blocks set parallel along a narrow green corridor. The structures are spartan and unembellished: flat roofs, ribbon windows, raw concrete panels. But look closely, and there is an unexpected softness—an intimacy of scale, a generosity in the shared courtyards, stairwells that open to light wells with frosted glass panels. Tóth's belief in privacy and collectivity coexisting is evident here: The plan prioritizes domestic quietude while encouraging neighborly proximity. 

Városmajor Workers’ Housing Complex, Budapest, after completion

In 1936, Tóth completed his most celebrated building, the Pécs Children’s Sanatorium. Located on a hillside outside the city, the sanatorium was designed to treat children with tuberculosis, and its architecture reflects a near-obsessive concern with light, hygiene, and recovery. The main wing is a horizontal slab perched on pilotis, its long glass facade oriented to capture the morning sun. The interiors are luminous but austere: tiled floors, movable partitions, built-in furniture. Every window is positioned to optimize airflow. A sun terrace, now overgrown, once overlooked a wooded slope. In architectural circles, the building was sometimes compared to Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium (in southwest Finland), though Tóth himself disliked comparisons. He described the building, in a rare note preserved in the Hungarian State Archives, as “a machine for slowing down breath.”

Pécs Children’s Sanatorium

The last project Tóth is known to have completed in Europe was the Nagyvárad Public Bath (1938) in Romania, commissioned as part of a regional public health initiative. The building no longer exists, as it was bombed during the war and later demolished. But photographs and architectural drawings reveal a curious hybrid of functionality and ritualism. The entrance hall was lined with narrow columns and illuminated from above by a circular skylight. The baths themselves were spare, almost monastic. Tóth seemed to have conceived of cleansing not just as sanitation, but as ceremony. Unlike his earlier work, which emphasized horizontality, the Nagyvárad bath used vertical shafts of light, narrow passages, and vaulted ceilings to produce a sense of elevation. It is perhaps his most theatrical building—and the only one that hints at an architectural spirituality.

Nagyvárad Public Bath

Across these projects, a few themes recur. First, an unwavering commitment to utility without austerity. Tóth’s buildings never scold; they serve. Second, a precise and sometimes playful use of light. Light not as spectacle, but as a spatial instrument. And third, a subtle, almost reluctant lyricism. His work suggests a belief that architecture should disappear into use, but not into invisibility. It seems to ask for silence, not admiration.

There is also a persistent undertone of withdrawal. As the 1930s progressed, his buildings became more inward-facing, more restrained. Some have read this as a political reaction to the rise of fascism; others see in it the personal temperament of a man suspicious of grandeur. Tóth rarely wrote about his work, and when he did, he spoke in aphorisms. “A building should not compete with the person inside it,” he once remarked. Another note reads simply: “Light belongs to everyone.”

From 1938 onward, there is a gap in the record. Tóth disappears. It is known—briefly and only from a few postwar interviews—that he was interned during the war at Buchenwald, though he rarely spoke of it. In 1947, he reappeared in the United States, thinner, grayer, but working again. The postwar buildings are another story.

Why revisit his early work now? Partly because it offers a different lineage of modernism: quieter, smaller in scale, more ethically attuned. In an era of architectural spectacle, Tóth’s humility feels radical. But also because these buildings, fading as they are, remind us that modernism was never a single voice. It was a fugue, and Tóth’s part in it—minor, austere, and strangely luminous—deserves to be heard.

Today, a few of his buildings remain. The workers’ housing is still occupied, though patched with vinyl tiles and covered with satellite dishes. The Pécs sanatorium is disused, its corridors filled with dust and ivy. Of the Nagyvárad baths, only a foundation survives in a municipal park. Yet even in their erosion, these works resist oblivion. They were not made to impress. They were made to endure.

There is a kind of moral elegance in Tóth’s early architecture, a belief that buildings must care for those who enter them. That belief may no longer be fashionable, but it remains, quietly, one of modernism’s most profound promises. And in the work of László Tóth, it found one of its most devoted, if overlooked, practitioners.

Jlohom Jgan (b. 1945 in Helsinki) is a writer, architectural historian, and unlicensed tour guide to buildings that may or may not have existed. He currently lives somewhere between a microfilm reader and a misfiled building permit.

Cover image: László Tóth circa 1928, photo by Lucia Moholy