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

Aladár Kármán and Gyula Cillmann, the team whose tender for the Török Bank was awarded first prize, also designed this bank’s head office at no. 5 Koronaherceg (today Petőfi Sándor) utca, around 1905.

A contemporary photograph gives a fair idea of what an elegant financial institute in the inner city looked like, one which was meant to implant in Hungary the Viennese Secession and a metropolitan style.

The first Pest Domestic Savings Bank

CoMPETITVE DESIGN BY ÖdŐN LeCHNER FOR THE FlRST PEST DOMESTIC

Savings Bank

The bank, the oldest financial institute in Hungary, having outgrown its almost fifty-year old Ybl wing, started to build a new head office at the corner of Deák Ferenc utca and Váci utca. In 1908 Ignác Alpár, Lóránd Almási Balogh, Alajos Hauszmann, Dezső Hültl, the Korb and Giergl team, Ödön Lechner, Antal Steinhardt, Zsigmond Quittner and, in order to raise the prestige of the competition, two internationally renowned masters, Bruno Möhring of Berlin and Friedrich Ohmann of Vienna, were invited to tender. The jury was also international and included Ludwig Heim of Berlin, the already familiar Karl König and Paul Wallot from Dresden as well as the Hungarians Kamill Fittler and Frigyes Schulek. They awarded the first prize to Ignác Alpár, the second to Dezső Hültl, and the third to Bruno Möhring. The tender announcement stipulated that the facades should be made in a “traditional" style, which was why even Lechner hid his peculiar style behind neo-Baroque forms-something which he would probably have changed if he had been given the commission. Hültl

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