Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
The Kazinczy utca Synagogue
expected to by creating a building of truly unique value. The competition announced in 1909 invited plans for a multi-functional complex of religious buildings to include a head office, a nursery school, a kitchen, and a restaurant as well as a temple. The competition advertised at the end of a decade that was to close a period of boom resulted in a construction which marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. It is said that the 19th century ended with the last pre-war year; in the architecture of Budapest the same date can be seen as the beginning of the twentieth century with the early modern buildings designed by Béla Lajta and the Vágó and Löffler brothers. Competitive designs were evaluated by a jury comprising community leaders and expert architects. The first prize was awarded to józsef Porgesz and Sándor Skutetzky’s jointly submitted plans. In spite of that, the commissioners selected designs created by Béla and Samu Sándor Löffler, who had worked with Frigyes Spiegel and Béla Lajta. The first building to be completed, deep inside the plot of land, was the community headquarters. The overall impression made by the central office was determined by the bulk of the staircase and the stained-glass windows of the halls designed by Miksa Róth. In the next stage (1913), the architects made a virtue of necessity by eliciting an atmosphere of Oriental medievalism from the limited space at their disposal in Kazinczy utca. With the row of houses standing within a few yards across the street, there is virtually no space outside the synagogue, which diminishes the the vast building's ability to impress with its monumental proportions from a perspective view. It is for that reason that the designers detached elements of the architecture from the main plane of the building to organise them around a break in the street-line in a terraced pattern. The ground plan is arranged around two axes: with its projecting bulk to the left, the building turns in the direction both of Wesselényi utca and Dohány utca, creating the illusion of actually blocking up Kazinczy utca. That was how the monumentality of the temple was achieved despite all the crippling constraints. The resulting architectural development is reminiscent of an archaic, organically grown town, which thus translates the commissioners' Orthodox outlook into the idiom of urban planning. Building over the plot right up to its external boundary has its pragmatic function, as the pair of pylons framing the gate hide the stairways to the women's gallery. The same architectonic idea is made manifest on Lajta's contemporaneous work, the refreshingly progressive apartment block at 19 Népszínház utca (1912). The toned-down appearance of the moderately ornamented synagogue fagade—a novelty at the time—displays the Oriental traditions behind the "modernism'1 of the Art Nouveau, the hallmark of Lechner’s trend-setting art. Schol62
