Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)
The frontage of Jónás Hecht’s shop at 15 Szent István tér, V salers (15 Szent István tér, District V) was designed by Béla Lajta in 1907. He transformed the ground floor area to the left of the entrance of the early Eclectic apartment block without disturbing the order of the facade, only altering the shape of the apertures. He used copper plates and eosin- glazed tiles made in the famous Zsolnay porcelain factory to cover the wall surfaces. The shop sign written in ceramic letters used to be framed with embossed copper plates between the balconies of the first floor. While the ornaments on the copper plates are reminiscent of the stylized plants and bird figures found on handwoven articles, the decorations on the encasement of the two pilasters evoke the treasury of motifs used in Székely wood carving - except, of course, that they are all made to fit Art Nouveau. On closer inspection, the plan of the frontage is revealed among the ornaments on the left pilaster. Two small eosin-glazed tiles have been placed on either side of the entrance to the shop; on one can be found the company’s founding date (1850), while the other features the date when the shopfront was built (1907). The rising sun beneath the first date symbolizes the foundation, and the sun at zenith beneath the second refers to the “adulthood” of the company. We are probably not mistaken if we see symbols on the metal embossing, too. The fish could refer to the name of the proprietor (Hecht means pike). The arrival of the 1910s saw the introduction of bronze shopfronts. Several firms (Bruchsteiner & Stern, Emil Hei- nicke, etc.) began to specialize in metal shopfronts, but only a few managed to stay in business after World War 1. But it was then that the success story of the engineers Haas and Somogyi began. Their names became inseparable from the history of shopfront construction for nearly forty years. Haas & Somogyi grew out of the Austro-Hungarian Luxfer-Prism Factory Ltd. Its Luxfer glass was main14
