László Hudec was a Hungarian-Slovak architecture from the 19th century, and will be one of the subjects at our upcoming webinar on 30 January 2021 about Three Giants of Czech and Slovak Architecture.

Hudec was a from a town named Besztercebánya in Austria-Hungary. This town is now known as Banská Bystrica in Slovakia. It was one of only a handful of royal free cities, or "libera regiae civitas" in Latin. These are the most important cities in the Kingdom of Hungary because they were granted certain privileges by the King, including a measure of autonomy. They were pretty much the Hungarian equivalent to the Holy Roman Empire's Free and Imperial Cities.

Here is a list of the Free Royal Cities of Hungary which were located in what is now the present day Slovakia. As you can see, there aren't really that many!

An excellent resource for those just getting started in Czech genealogy is the Czech Genealogy for Beginners blog.

Here is a post everybody should read from the site. It answers the following questions about house numbers:

- When did house numbering begin and why?

- How were house numbers first given?

- How did the systems change over time?

- How frequent were house renumberings and how did that work?

- How can I know which house number I'm looking at?

Slovakia and the United States are separated by thousands of miles.  Slovak architect Lenka Petráková is hoping to make the waters that have historically connected us – the world’s oceans – a cleaner place.  

Petráková has designed The 8th Continent a “floating station restores the marine environment's balance by collecting plastic debris from surface and breaking it down to recyclable material. It connects the ocean plastic recycling centre with a research and education facility.”

The station’s unique floral design recently earned an architectural award from the Jacques Rougerie Foundation of France, a non-profit that “encourages boldness and innovation in architectural undertakings as well as artistic creation relatd to sea and space in order to bring out the next Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, Gustave Eiffel, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier of the 21st Century.”

From her office in London, Petráková will share more about her work as CGSI celebrates global innovation in architecture by Slovaks and Czechs at a webinar on Saturday Jan. 30.  CGSI will highlight the acocmplishments of three giants of the profession who respectively made an impact in 19th Century America (Leopold Eidlitz), China in the 1920s (Laszlo Hudec) and in the Caribbean of the early 20th Century (Antonin Nechodoma)..

Journey with us across the seas to unique tropical Prairie School homes in Puerto Rico, to the first skyscrapers in the commercial heart of pre-Communist Shanghai and to the historic sidewalks of New York. See our home page for sign up details.   

Petráková studied architecture at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her proposed ocean cleaning station consists of five parts:

• A Barrier to collect waste and harvest tidal energy
• A Collector, where waste is sorted, biodegraded and stored
• A Research and Education Centre to study and showcase aquatic environments
• Greenhouses where plants are grown, and water is desalinated
• Living Quarters with support facilities