Lechner and Secession

Hungarian Architecture: Castles, Bridges & Grand Buildings

Course 1 · Chapter 7 · Lechner and Secession

The Millennium buildings of Chapter 6 borrowed their styles from elsewhere: Gothic from England, Renaissance from Italy. Some architects found that uncomfortable. If Hungary was a nation with its own history, should it not also have its own architecture? Around the turn of the twentieth century a number of designers tried to answer that question, drawing on Art Nouveau (called Secession in central Europe), on Eastern and folk motifs, and on the colourful ceramics of the Pécs factory of Zsolnay. This chapter follows that search. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

The Question: What Is a Hungarian Style?

There was no agreed answer, and that is the interesting part. Some architects looked to medieval Hungarian churches, some to the decoration of folk art, some to supposed Eastern origins of the Magyars (a theory that is now treated cautiously, check). Each answer was a claim about identity as much as a taste in ornament. Reading these buildings means asking not only how they look but what argument their designers were making.

Ödön Lechner

Ödön Lechner (1845 to 1914) is the figure most often named as the founder of a Hungarian Secession (check the dates and the description). Two of his buildings in Budapest are the standard examples.

Museum of Applied Arts

Designed with Gyula Pártos and built in the 1890s (check). The exterior combines coloured ceramic tiles with forms taken from Indian and Persian sources, as well as Hungarian motifs.

Postal Savings Bank

Built around the turn of the century (check). Its roof is covered in decorated tiles, and the façade carries folk-style patterns and bees in the ornament (check the details).

Geological Institute

Another Lechner building of the 1890s, with a tower topped by a globe held up by figures (check).

Zsolnay tiles

The Zsolnay factory in Pécs developed weather-resistant glazed ceramics, often called pyrogranite, which gave Lechner's roofs their colour and lasted outdoors (check the term and the dates).

Look up at the roof Many Secession buildings are best appreciated from a distance, where the patterned roof tiles are visible. If you can only see the ground-floor shopfronts, you have missed half of the building. Looking up is a good habit in any historic city.

Secession in Budapest

Building	Architect	Note
Liszt Academy of Music	Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl	Opened in the early 1900s with a richly decorated concert hall (check); the music itself belongs to Hungarian Music
Gellért Hotel	Ármin Hegedűs, Artúr Sebestyén and Izidor Sterk	Opened in 1918 as a hotel with attached baths (check); treated here as a building, not as a spa
Postal Savings Bank	Ödön Lechner	Folk-inspired decoration on a large office building (check)
Museum of Applied Arts	Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos	Tiles and Eastern-inspired forms (check)

Two kinds of Secession Not all Hungarian Secession is national in intent. The Gellért Hotel and the Liszt Academy are in a style that was current across central Europe, with sinuous lines and ornament, and they are not especially "Hungarian" in subject. Lechner's buildings are the ones that tried to make the style specifically national. Telling the two apart is a useful exercise for any visitor.

Károly Kós and the Folk Revival

A younger generation of architects, including Károly Kós, looked to the vernacular building of the countryside, especially Transylvania, for a more rural and traditional idea of Hungarian form (check the details). Kós is associated with the Wekerle housing estate in Budapest and with buildings at the Zoo, designed with a collaborator (check the names and the dates). His work uses steep roofs, timber and rustic details that look quite different from Lechner's ceramic ornament, and it influenced later organic architecture, which Chapter 8 will meet again.

Check the details Lists of "the first Hungarian Secession building" and statements about Eastern origins of the style are common but contested. Dates of buildings often differ between design, construction and opening. Treat each date and each attribution above as a starting point and confirm it against a specialist source.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain why the search for a "Hungarian style" was about identity as well as decoration, and give two different answers that architects of the period proposed.

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Exercise 2

Describe the Postal Savings Bank or the Museum of Applied Arts, and explain the role of Zsolnay ceramics in its appearance.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Compare Lechner's approach with that of Károly Kós, and say which of the Gellért Hotel or the Liszt Academy is the less "national" and why.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Question: what would a Hungarian style look like?
Lechner: Museum of Applied Arts, Postal Savings Bank, Geological Institute
Zsolnay: glazed ceramic roof tiles from Pécs
General Secession: Liszt Academy, Gellért Hotel
Kós: folk and Transylvanian-inspired revival; Wekerle estate
Check: Eastern-origins theory, dates, attributions, "first" claims

Next chapter: Modernism, War and the Soviet Layer, which covers the twentieth century from the 1930s to the end of communism.