Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

Church of the Sacred Heart, 1891

example of the simple but atmospherically charged spatial proportions of French Romanesque churches and design the vault of the nave with main buttresses and cross-vaults but reinforce these with abutments and arch buttresses on the outside.’’ The medieval effect is further enhanced by the gargoyles on the church. The walls are made of dry-pressed redbrick, while the cornice and the ornamental arches are covered with pirogranite tiles made in the Zsolnay factory. The characteristic pillars set on elevated bases and dividing the nave into five sections were carved from graphite-grey Tirolean syenite, while the pillar capitals and bases are made of marble. Kauser used iron, too, when its application did not appear to him to clash with the "original” (i.e. historical) structural system. In other words, he redirected the forces with which the main wall weighs down on the capitals of the nave onto the exterior walls by way of the arch buttresses (to prevent overstraining). The architect saw his own historicist work as an example of sorts. "1 say unto you that you had better look up to Holy Ják, Horpács, Lébény and Zsámbék,” he would say, because it was in these examples, rooted in the heritage of the past, that a desirable Hungarian style could be discovered. (A 19th century reconstruction of the western portal of the late

■ The nave with the apie

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