Dr Ágnes Herczeg, member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, gave her academic inaugural lecture. The President of our Foundation is the first landscape architect to be elected a member of the Academy. In her inaugural lecture titled “We live in the landscape”, the Mőcsényi Mihály Award-winning senior landscape architect and garden designer, Candidate of agricultural sciences, expressed her hope that her membership of the Academy will contribute to the return of the architectural world view to a landscape-centred approach, the basic idea of which is that the landscape is the basis of all our actions.
In May 2023, the Board of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (HAA) decided to admit Dr Ágnes Herczeg as a Corresponding Member of the Academy’s Section of Architecture. According to the rules of the HAA, membership becomes final when the candidate delivers her inaugural lecture. At the ceremony, Ferenc Salamin, architect and head of the HAA’s Section of Architecture, welcomed the guests and invited Dr Albert Fekete, landscape architect and director of the Institute of Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning and Garden Art at the Hungarian University of Agricultural and Life Sciences, to praise the merits of Ágnes Herczeg. In his speech, Albert Fekete recalled that Ágnes Herczeg’s sense of vocation is characterised by three key concepts: community, landscape and homeland. “Her work responds beyond technical, artistic or ecological content to all the invisible, intangible forces and context that have shaped the landscape over the centuries: social conflicts, relationships between people, historical events and figures, questions of real life and philosophy,” underlined Albert Fekete, who drew parallels with the spirit of Áron Tamási’s story of Mátyás the Icebreaker: “the one who emerged from the unbusied infinity above to serve on earth, just six and a half decades ago, to help people of the nation to prosper.”
Afterwards, Dr Ágnes Herczeg gave her academic inaugural lecture, in which she shed light on her own ars poetics of garden art through the concept of landscape as used by Mőcsényi. In her research on the history of landscape and its essence, garden art, she arrived at the key question of when people begin to look at the world around them as external observers. Speaking about the relationship between place, home and homeland, the academic explained that if we see the landscape as a living, animate organism, then the spirit of this organism is man himself. It is the human community that is related in every way to that particular location. At the same time, according to Ágnes Herczeg, the notion of home and homeland is closely linked to the notion of landscape, defining the identity of the people who live in it. In the closing words of her inaugural lecture, the academic recalled that at the centre of her personal and professional career is the quest for knowledge, for knowing the world and knowing oneself, which are inseparable from each other. She compared herself to a traveller, present for millennia and in all cultures, who comes and goes, who brings and delivers news, who sees phenomena from the outside and has an insight into the world of the people who live there.
After the inaugural lecture, Gábor Richly, Secretary General of the HAA, representing the HAA Board, thanked Dr Albert Fekete, Dr Ágnes Herczeg and the audience for their participation, and announced the successful end of Dr Ágnes Herczeg’s admittance procedure for the academic membership by accepting her lecture.
Read the full text of the inaugural lecture here.
https://www.magyarkertorokseg.hu/herczeg-agnes-tajban-elunk/
