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

The St. Ladislas Parish Church, 1897

laid in the wall beneath the chancel on 12 June 1894. Two years later, on 27 June, the feast of St. Ladislas, the topping-out ceremony marking the conclusion of the bricklayers’ work was held, and on n August the following year the cross of the church was consecrated.

The free-standing building aspiring to the skies and thus invoking the Gothic period is built on a transept pattern with a basilica construction with external buttresses. Besides the fine proportions of its mass, the building owes its beauty to its sculptural decoration on the outside, the Gothic designs, the brick lesenes, the inlays made of ceramic brick, and the colour texture of pirogranite patterns arranged in Hungarian motifs.

Standing in the central axis of the western facade is its crown-helmeted, hexagonal steeple. Surrounded by stair turrets, the slender tower reaches higher, at 83 metres, than any other church tower in Budapest. Its open base serves as the main entrance porch. (The design is related to that of the Üllői út entrance to one of Lechner’s masterworks, the Museum of Applied Arts.) The chancel, which is closed with five sides of an octagon, is surrounded by the sacristy on the outside.

A 1894 issue of the journal Építő Ipar (Construction Industry) highlighted the variety of materials and colours used, the "harmonious blend of architectural forms of both Occidental and Oriental origins’’, due to which the church can be regarded as a specimen of the tjin-de-&íécle Art Nouveau. The building has been sneered at for its eclectic character, its critics disapproving of the discrepancy between the Gothic nature of the overall construction and the very

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