Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

The Royal Postal Savings Bank

The Royal Postal Savings Bank, designed by Ödön Lechner,

AT THE TORN OF THE CENTURY

The institution was established in 1885, with the main objective, spelt out in the prospectus issued at its founding, to collect deposits

not from the surpluses of the rich, but from the pennies of simple farmers, workers and children saued often with great difficulty, with great sacrifice and self-discipline...

The services provided by the bank, controlled and guaranteed by the state, were available at post offices throughout the country. Its turnover increased eleven times within the first decade and a half of its existence.

Tenders for designs for the head office were officially invited in 1899. Ödön Lechner won second prize behind the Post’s own architect Gyula Bérezik. (Lechner, having no studio of his own had been provided with room to work in the office of Sándor Baumgarten. He got an enthusiastic co-worker in the person of his host, who was then the architect in charge of the school-construction project run by the Cultural Ministry.) The Minister of Commerce, Sándor Hegedűs, initiated another closed tender competition, and as a result on 29 April 1900 Lechner was commissioned to prepare the construction plans. This outstanding work of the designer’s career (and that of the history of Hungarian architecture) was completed in one and a half years to be ceremonially opened in the November of 1901.

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