Földes Mária: Ornamentation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

Ministry of Finance, sculptural decoration on facade

mous columns. Not even the female figures on the oriel windows can lighten the mass of the latter. A group of children dancing with garlands, cameo-like oval spaces, and coats of arms are meant to reduce the weightiness of the building and thus to ease the overall impression, but to no apparent avail.

The appointment of the interior spaces is similarly gloomy and depressing. There is nothing to break the large expanses of the cumbersome dark marble covering in the entrance hall. One almost feels smothered by the solid side walls, the dark-stained wooden panelling, an effect exacerbated by the scanty lighting and the lack of sufficiently large glass surfaces. Why it is still worth our while wandering around in the building is because of the few really beautifully finished details, the richly ornamented railing which hides the radiators, the brass fittings and bannisters and the cut glass windows of the swing doors.

The building of another financial institution, the Hun31