Laszlo Huszar’s meticulous work in planning the urbanisation of imporant areas of West Africa and South-East Asia helped to lay the foundations of their successful transition to modern development. But his concern for the general wellbeing of society through good regional planning and infrastructure was the product of a deep humanitarian instinct and a thorough technical grounding under Communism.
Fleeing Hungary during the 1956 anti-Communist uprising, soon after qualifying in architecture, he came to England via Vienna. With the aid of a British government grant, he took an economics degree at LSE.
In 1957 he was able to bring his widowed mother out of Hungary legally but two years later she died. Having lost his extended Jewish family in the Second World War, he went to Ghana in 1960 on a research fellowship in planning at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.
During his five years in Ghana he became head of the university department and made a significant contribution to planning and developing new towns and villages for those displaced by the new lake formed through the Volta river project. His work as co-director of the project, in conjunction with the United Nations, was recognised locally with a road, Huszar Street, named after him.
Returning to England, he taught at the Architectural Association’s School of Architecture and then at the University of Nottingham. After forming a professional consultancy, Huszar Brammah, in 1971, he spent the next 20 years as a consultant specialising in projects in the emerging countries of SouthEast Asia.
Advertisement
His first assignment took him to Malaysia as deputy leader of a team working on the development of the Klang valley. In 1973 he led a British government-funded team on a regional study of southeast Thailand, where he met his second wife Chularat (known as Eow), a Thai economist.
However, in 1969 he had married Esther, sister of an old school friend from Hungary. After their divorce, he married Chularat in 1979.
From 1975 to 1990 he worked on projects in Indonesia, notably the expansion of Bandung and the development of southeast Sulawesi, a small “spice island” selected for resettling inhabitants from overcrowded Java. He spent the last three years of this period in Jakarta as urban policy adviser to the Indonesian Government. In between he went to Brunei for three years to draw up a master plan to modernise the Sultan’s rich but undeveloped state.
His appreciation of customs and attitudes in that part of the world was greatly enhanced by his wife’s input, which informed his approach to people and problems. His urbane manner masked a traumatic past, when he fled through the streets of war-torn Budapest as a boy of 11 and was rescued by the Spanish Red Cross. His father, an eminent paediatrician instrumental in establishing Central Europe’s first premature baby unit, had been sent to a labour camp. His mother had disappeared, apparently forced into hiding. It was several months before he saw them again.
When he was a child, his parents had arranged for him to be baptised, in a mistaken attempt to improve his life chances as they watched events unfold in 1930s Germany. When the Red Army entered Budapest in January 1945, Huszar at one point hid under a bed, which was then taken over by a soldier raping a woman.
Advertisement
Under Russian occupation his parents returned to their flat, which was split up to accommodate other families. Huszar became increasingly active in student politics and his worried father paid for him to be taken out of the country in 1948. He was caught at the border and spent two months in jail in solitary confinement.
When the Russian tanks rolled in again to quell the uprising of 1956 and arrest political activists, he walked with two friends to the Austrian border. Once there, they had no idea which way to turn but they spotted a guard in Austrian uniform, who pointed them to a refugee camp.
Huszar was in bed when he heard on the radio that Britain would accept refugees, the first country to do so. He jumped up, pulled his trousers over his pyjamas and was the first in the queue. He finished up with his uncle’s old friend in Golders Green, London.
He did not return to Hungary until 1981. He searched out his old home and found old friends and neighbours, who were delighted to see him but refused to talk to him indoors for fear of being bugged. They felt safe to speak only when walking in the street or in a park.
After the collapse of communism he went back regularly for school reunions and anniversaries but in recent years felt unhappy with the way the country was going. However, he became increasingly involved with the Hungarian diaspora and was general secretary of the National Association of Hungarians in England.
Advertisement
He returned from his South-East Asian commitments to settle in England in 1991, when his young son was 7. As his health started to fail a few years later he reduced his work-load but not his interest in people and politics.
He is survived by his wife, daughter, son and two stepsons.
Laszlo Huszar, architect, urban and regional development specialist, and Hungarian activist, was born on November 15, 1932. He died on May 26, 2007, aged 74