Readers, however, were fascinated, as their letters showed, in Makovecz’s ideas of “building-beings”, of an organic geometry based on the real human frame rather than classical geometries rooted in idealised mathematical ratios. It did seem strange to see the exclusive pages of the patrician Archie crowded with a forest of timber buildings, adopting their forms from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The upshot of my trip was that the Architectural Review was able to publish Makovecz on a generous scale and outside the pinched confines of Communist Hungary for the first time. He was, like John Ruskin and William Morris before him, unafraid to talk of God and Nature He was clearly unable to stand back from events. He was neither cool nor laid-back, as so many of the architects I had met up to that point were. He was a natural fighter who had learned that architecture is a powerful political weapon as well as the art of building and a method of sheltering people in, potentially, beautiful surroundings.I was very moved by his buildings, so much a part of the ground they rose from, as well as by his colleagues, craftsmen and apprentices, who, poor in terms of money, were rich in spirit. Makovecz proved, over and again, that buildings really can have a soul.

He brought the notion of genius loci, the sense of place, to life for me as no flatulent architectural tome had ever been able to do. He proved that rebels can be professionals, that the fight for human freedom can be won on the drawing board as well as through demonstrations and the barrel of a gun. Makovecz had expected to find the emissary of the mighty Architectural Review a distinguished and tweedy architect-professor type waiting in the lobby to discuss fashionable -isms and -wasms. He was taken aback to find a 25-year-old armed with little more than burning curiosity and a passion for architecture and rebellion.The next few days I remember as some of the most important in my life, not just as a critic and writer, but as a person. The text of the book was no help in deciphering this inscrutable structure.I wrote to the editor of the magazine of the Institute of Hungarian Architects in Budapest, asking for an address for Makovecz and to see more of his work. A letter was returned with an address, but no pictures, as Makovecz was, because of his political leanings and the oddball nature of his work, essentially unpublished I wrote to Makovecz; his wife, Marianne, wrote back Come and visit, please. So I did, arriving in Budapest from Vienna in an unforgettable thunderstorm on one of those long, drab olive-green trains that had stopped at the border for nearly an hour while red-starred guards armed with antique Tommy guns poked rigid faces into every nook and corner of the “Wiener Waltzer”.I booked into the Gellert Hotel, that Art Nouveau hill-top masterpiece overlooking the Pest in Buda, and waited for Makovecz, who arrived with his wife in an ancient and rain-sodden Renault 4 (Marianne’s link with the Paris she had once been able to visit and the freedom she and Imre yearned for).

I had seen a postage- stamp size photograph of the mortuary chapel he had built in the Farkasret cemetery on the edge of Budapest in a compendium of the work of contemporary world architects I had seen nothing like it before. It looked, from the photograph, like the inside of the ribcage of a whale (it is in fact, a three-dimensional depiction of the human chest). Cut off from mainstream design during the Seventies and much of the Eighties, Makovecz became a kind of Robin Hood of Hungarian architecture. When he designed a fish restaurant in the guise of a giant fish, was, his tutors asked, young Imre mad or simply disruptive? In a surprisingly imaginative moment, his examiners passed him fit to practise as an architect. Yet, from graduation, Makovecz’s fight with the Communist regime began in earnest.Despite some success, he was banned from teaching and was lucky to find a lonely and obscure job as as a forestry architect in the hills around Budapest.

In the 1956 uprising, Makovecz was one of many students arrested (death sentences were commuted finally in 1961) for his part in the famous, and famously unsuccessful, rebellion.From college days, at the Technical University of Budapest, Makovecz ploughed a distinct furrow. His religious spirit, however, has also been shaped by a near-mystical love of his country (its people, soil, Celtic roots and highly distinctive language, but not its political institutions) and a profound search for ways in which we can build and live in balance with nature.From his very earliest days helping his father, a carpenter, to sabotage invading German tanks in 1944, Imre Makovecz has been a stubborn and creative fighter, tackling head on the forces of darkness – at first Nazism and then the Communist regime that ruled Hungary until 1989. Not, I hasten to add, of the holier-than-thou, bible-thumping, evangelical school – he is too genial for that – but, in British terms, of a Wesley with a dash of Tom Paine, William Blake and Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers.A nonconformist’s nonconformist, Makovecz is also, by upbringing and choice, and like so many Hungarians, a Catholic. One of nature’s radicals, he is entirely his own man and one who vehemently detests the culture of money (he lives modestly). He has about him something, not so much of the prophet or shaman, as the visionary poet or radical preacher. His work is, thus, transcendental, overcoming international boundaries and prejudices while being deeply rooted in Hungarian soil and in the hearts of those it is built for and by.Makovecz is unlike most architects He is not a materialist; far from it. Nor is he engaged in the conventional web of professional rivalries.