Sándor Kováts Borz (1940—1973) lived only 33 years, yet he was one of the most important Hungarian designers of his time. This exhibition tries to expand the undeservedly short life of Sándor Kováts Borz in several ways, on the one hand, by embedding the few objects left behind in an international environment, and on the other hand, through the work of the current students of the Moholy Nagy University of Arts, the campus so important to him, who are processing his life's work.
Borz's short career is a real condensation: he built the first catamaran on the Balaton, designed a music school, a university campus, boutiques in the rural Hungary of the sixties, tubular and fiberglass furniture, a modular lamp family, and even a shell bell.
He was among the first to present system-level planning in Hungary. He tried to strive for the optimal minimum in his works. He was careful not to overproduce and built on what was available to him. This is also reflected in the material submitted for the Minimáltér tender announced by Imre Makovecz. He was interested in Scandinavian and Finnish design, so he learned Finnish and then went on a study trip to Finland with his wife, where he made good friends with Yrjö Kukkapuro. He met, among others, Tapio Wirkkala and Olof Bäckström, the chief designer of the Fiskars company. He was the father of two children.
Borz designed, developed and produced objects suitable for mass production in an age when neither the manufacturing background nor the market supported this in Hungary, not to mention that both in terms of technology and raw materials, scarcity was more typical than abundance.
The knowledge that Borz possessed came primarily from his paternal heritage, and this heritage can be read even by today's youngest design generation in his objects. Borz's father invented and developed the speedboat engine and founded the first speedboat factory in Hungary. However, after the Second World War, his factory was nationalized, where he was not even re-employed as a worker. A similar fate befell the elder Ernő Rubik at the same time, whose son, together with Borz, was a teaching assistant at the College of Applied Arts, and the year after Borz's death, he invented the world-famous cube. Rubik's father also understood product development well, as he developed and designed gliders in the factory he founded himself, which was also nationalized after the war. "The former factory owners either fled abroad, went to prison, or were assigned to some sort of menial work. But because of my father's expertise, it seemed indispensable. Finally, he was employed as the chief engineer of the factory he founded. He was an excellent, experienced professional, so he actually became responsible for everything: he was the engineer, the designer, the salesman, but he even came up with the names of the products, and in fact, he often personally managed the production process."
Just like the elder Ernő Rubik, the elder Sándor Kováts did not lose his knowledge, creativity and vitality along with his private property, which he used later in joint works with his son.
Borz was excited about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in a freer world, where the market builds on design, and vice versa, designers can also count on solvent demand. Under manufacturing conditions, he tried to design objects that could be immediately mass-produced. He would have liked the objects he designed to be accessible to anyone and not considered luxury products. However, all of this was deliberately prevented by the system at the time. Unfortunately, only one prototype of the exhibited furniture remains. This exhibition is the first time that the objects of Sándor Kováts Borz are presented alongside the objects of Western European designers active in the second half of the sixties and the first half of the seventies.
