Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)
which are in District V). When business began to thrive, merchants were no longer satisfied with narrow entrances and shop windows. In order to beat the competition, they wanted to show more of their goods and to catch the attention of pedestrians in every possible way. At first, naively beautiful painted sign-boards and advertising boards appeared hung on the turned-back shutters together with signs and pictures painted right on the walls. These were followed by the installation of flat show-cases on the pilasters. Gradually, merchants occupied all the space available on the ground floor areas of buildings. The shopfront in the present sense of the term appeared in Hungary when a regulation permitted the building of shop windows to have a frontage projecting from the facade of the building by thirty centimetres. Thus it was now made possible to combine the previously separate apertures and the show-cases placed on pilasters in a single architectonic composition. The shopfront - the wooden construction added to the fagade - contained not only the entrance to the shop, its shop windows and sign-board, but also the awning and the blinds or the safety grills used when closing the shop. As opposed to the previous anarchy of the sign-boards, shopfronts represented a higher stage of development, creating order among the various elements belonging to a shop. This construction was given forms taken from historical architecture. It had a base and a cornice, whose frieze gave room to the sign-board. These lower and upper parts were connected by carved wooden columns or engaged columns, which framed the shop windows and the entrance. The wooden shopfront was usually the product of craftsmanship - it was designed and built by master carpenters. In the last quarter of the 19th century, however, architects also designed shopfronts, mainly when they were built together with the buildings themselves. Late 19th century In photos taken at' the end of the 19th century we can see that Budapest’s inner city was full of wooden shopfronts of various sizes, which made an almost continuous wall on the ground floors of buildings. This proliferation of shop windows was often criticized later because these shopfronts were built without any regard to other portals or the 7
