Digitisation
The digitisation of the Hudec collection's letters and a hundreds of small pictures originally attached to them - most of them László Hudec's own photos - is an ongoing project. Above that, the scanning of the original portfolio albums and restoring its content was of utmost importance. The long-term goal is for to show these unique visual, printed and written documents to a wider public on the Europeana website, the multimedia electronic library of the European Union.
Restoration and digitisation of Hudec photo albums
The 2 portfolios of the architect's most important buildings contain contemporary photographs, blueprints and newspaper articles. Probably in the 1920s and 30s, László Hudec personally selected and organized his outstanding projects into photo albums and sent them to his relatives in Hungary. Most of the photos are unique enlargements, the last remaining copies, of which no copies can be found nor in the Shanghai archives neither in the archives of UVIC (University of Victoria, Canada) archives, an important center of the Hudec legacy. Thanks to the professional work of Edit Darabos, restaurtor of the Museum of Applied Arts, one of the most valuable Hudec objects has been restored to its former glory for exhibition purpoeses.
Processing of family correspondence
László Hudec kept up an intensive correspondence with his family members who moved to Hungary after 1st World War (Trianon) through his entire life. At first, he wrote deatiled stories of his life of his early years in Shanghai to his parents, then from 1922, after his father's death, he kept in touch with his siblings, including Jolán Hugyecz and her husband, István Jánossy through letters. Since he was always up to date with technological developments and quickly began to use them in his work as well as in his private life, he sent typewritten letters to his relatives from 1923. This intensive correspondance material is the basement of the family archives in Budapest which goes back to the Hugyecz ancestors of the 19th century,. The first processing took place during 2008-2009 and served as an important source for the László Hude monograph, the first book on him published in Hungary (Luca Poncellini, Júlia Csejdy: Hudec László, Holnap Kiadó). The next phase of the processing is the digital recording of the text of the letters, with teh goal of creating a larger textual content that can be searched and taged as needed.
Creating interactive media content
In 2008, at the initiative of the Hungarian Consulate in Shanghai, a research project exploring the life and work of László Hudec was launched. In the process, many valuable documents came to light, which were kept in the family archive in Budapest by Eszter Jánossy, the youngest child of István Jánossy and Jolán Hugyecz, the architect's niece. The processing of the rich material and László Hudec's revision as an outstenading Hungarian architect became an important topic for professional organizations, fisrt of all for the Association of Hungarian Architects. With their support, the Hudec Interactive Encyilopedia, a multimedia application was developed and it was presented on the World Exhibition in Shanghai in 2010. It aims to introduce the social and cultural background of the architect to the Chinese audience, illustrating the sources of his professional knowledge with pictures and a map, and to present the fateful moments of his adventurous life in a 25-minute documentary.
