Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)

Competitions for the Designs of a syangogue in Lipótváros, 1898-1906

lek) as well as members of the Israelite Community, the Board of Public Works and the Architectural Directorate of the Municipality. Invited to sit on the committee were the Viennese specialist of synagogues professor Karl König and architect Wilhelm Stiassny. Twenty-three competitive designs had been submitted by i February 1899, the deadline ending the extended competition period. The first prize was awarded to the work of Ernő Foerk and Ferenc Schömer, but with its huge twin-domes of a Middle-Eastern silhouette and Italian details, their design exceeded the project's financial limits. The second-prize winning design of Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor (Frommer) would have quadrupled the typical fagade of synagogue-architecture featuring a gable and two squat turrets, adding to it four taller towers on the corners and raising a vestibule in front of the main entrance as a small allusion to the San Marco Church in Venice. In the centre would have stood a heightened replica of the Hagia Sophia temple of Istanbul. One of the third prizes went to the as yet unknown Béla Lajta (Leiters- dorfer). The freshly-graduated architect combined a ground-plan extending the chapel-crowning of cathedrals into a hexagram with the canon-subverting forms of Modernism tamed by a Moorish-Gothic fagade. His design for the Lipótváros temple was Lajta’s first success. He coupled monumentality with the functionalist approach of modern architecture.

Besides those made by the other third-prize winner Lipót Baumhorn, designs prepared in cooperation by Izidor Scheer, László and József Vágó as well as works submitted by Vilmos Freund, and Géza Márkus were either commissioned or commended, as was the work prepared jointly by Géza Aladár Kármán and Gyula Ull- mann—which all bore the marks of Art Nouveau style to a greater or lesser extent.

The community announced another two limited competitions to find the best possible solution. The winners were once again Foerk and Schömer, this time with a nave-and-aisles design. Time went by, though, and with the expiry of the six- year period in which the plot was to be built, the land reverted to the municipality in 1906. The emblematic temple of Pest's Jewry was not to be built.

Of the two most outstanding competitors, Béla Lajta died a premature death and was never given a task of similar magnitude; many of the synagogues built in Hungary to plans by Lipót Baumhorn in the style developed for the Lipótváros competition—such as the ones at Fiume, Cegléd, Makó, Esztergom, Eger, Gyöngyös, Losonc, Temesvár, Budapest-Aréna út—stand now in ruins or have been, following the death of the communities once using them, rebuilt without regard to their original shape.

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