Földes Mária: Ornamentation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
only one certainty left about them-the fact that once they had functioned well. Mow it was not the Gothic or the Baroque world-view, but the faith vested in the Gothic cathedrals and Baroque churches that supported the walls of the neo-Gothic parish churches and the neo-Baroque apartment buildings. It appeared that the historical-looking stucco-coating did not merely resurrect the forms of the days of yore, but that it also lent the same solidity, the same security and authenticity to the buildings and the lives lived in them; a solidity upon which-as was believed-the world had rested in that wished-for past. That this belief was rather half-hearted, can be seen on the faces of our lares. The atlas-figure of the Baroque era used to be part of the living system of the building. Materialized in it were the forces condensed in one point of the organism, say, underneath the balcony above a gateway. As the house leaned on it, so, too, it leaned on the house. It was not only a powerful figure, but power itself embodied, whose idealistically carved shape borrowed its significance from the harmony of the building as a whole. The column-sculpture of the neo-Baroque, however, could no longer rely on the building, whose relevance was not the result of its own harmony but was an echo of a bygone period. The atlas is not an ideal figure any more, but a realistically carved shape instead. Its muscles are strained under the weight of the balcony, its features are contorted, and pearls of perspiration ooze out from under its dishevelled hair. With Paradise lost, the /are must become human. And, the last of the great Paradises, history itself became defunct. The prefigurative entities themselves, with their authority, disappeared from behind the buildings, as co-ordinates disappear from a blank map; eaten away by bomb-blasts and decay, the disorientated lares slumber in the midst of chaos. The Paradises, individual, group, and community significances, in which the lares could feel at home again, which they could faithfully guard, will have to be created by ourselves. Tamás Sajó 6
