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

One of the two main stairways. Lechner created an aura of magic,

UNPARALLELED AT THE TIME, WITH CLEAR LIGHT STRUCTURES AND MASS-PRODUCED, SIMPLE, FUNCTIONAL, AND YET DECORATIVE ELEMENTS

character of the establishment. The promotion of domestic applied arts (the Museum of Applied Arts); the exploration of natural resources lying in Hungary’s soil (the Institute of Geography); the stimulation of the economy through savings as a “national virtue” (the Savings Bank) are obvious motivating ideas behind Lechner’s decade-long endeavour to create a Hungarian stylistic idiom.

It is not out of place to note here, as a further remark on the history of architecture, that Lechner’s is a singular method even by international comparison. Not

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