Peter Ghyczy - Biography

Biography

Peter Ghyczy, child of a widespread aristocratic family grew up Buda, a fine district of Budapest. After the invasion of the Red Army 1945, in which his father was killed, he was sent to the family's property Vásárosnameny in the Puszta plains, where he also visited the village school. In 1947 he was brought to Belgium by the International Red Cross for one year, where he learned French.

After the family was expropriated of their estate, he returned to his mother in Budapest, where he finished primary school. From 1954 on he attended the Benedictine Secondary School in Pannonhalma connected to a famous monastery. 1956, after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising against the communist regime, he fled with his mother and brother via Vienna to Bonn.

In 1960 he attained his "Abitur" (A level) and started to study architecture at the Technical University of Aachen specializing on constructional engineering. Beginning in 1961 he assisted professor Rudolf Steinbach, a renowned German architect, and later worked at the institute of plastic research. In between he took jobs in Paris and at a Unesco project in Kalabsha, Egypt, which was saving antique ruins from a reservoir. 1967 he graduated as an architect in Aachen with a thesis on unconventional school buildings.

From 1968 to 1972 he lived in Lemförde in the South of Lower Saxony. In 1969 he became a German citizen. Peter Ghyczy is married and father of four. Today he lives in Beesel near the river of Maas at the east border of the Netherlands.