Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

1 Szabó Ervin tér, district VIII

It was on the edge of the magnates’ quarter where a certain count’s residence was built among veritable town palaces standing one after the other. In aristocratic circles the area defined by the streets behind and next to the National Museum came into fashion in the 1860s. It is on the border of this officially unrecognised but to contemporary city-dwellers easily recognisable region that, crowned with a huge dome, the residence of Frigyes Wenckheim rises above the city.

Construction began in 1887 and by the last years of the century the aristocratic Wenckheim family had occupied the magnificent reception rooms and suites. Here they entertained the ever-changing hosts of bedazzled guests in the splendid and spacious ball room - today the reading room of the Budapest Municipal Library.

The building was indeed what it had been meant to be - perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most luxurious private mansion in Pest. Its architect was Artúr Mei- nig, who specialised in aristocratic residences in Hungary, but he also designed numerous superior apartment blocks in the capital. One look at the building at 14 Szabadság tér designed in 1899 for the landowner and Member of Parliament Lázár Dungyerszky reveals the similarities between the shapes of the domes leaping towards the sky there and those impressing the onlooker here.

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