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

The second main stairway starts from a hexagonal space which provides for transition; its light stone covering, its stained glass windows, awash in playful, yellowish light illuminating the room with golden rays, and the graceful, light shapes of its banisters make this staircase into the most beautiful, enchanting part of the building. The two stairways appear to complement each other as the embodiments of the antithetical principles of feminine charm and masculine severity. (The shops on the ground floor facing Dorottya utca were joined to the bank and the facade was reconstructed accordingly.)

In the corridors on the upper floor we can observe an amazing aesthetic play. Alpár fitted stone slabs of patterns and colours sharply different from the rhythmically recurring stone facing, thus disturbing the orderly distribution of stones. This technique strikes one as if it had been transposed here from the world of Dutch constructivism, a style which was to follow Alpár’s period by a few years and which was, incidentally, at an enormous distance from his tastes.

This is how Alpár himself describes the completed building in the journal Építőipar (The Construction Industry) in 1913:

When creating the facade I endeavoured to break with the traditions of making feudal palace facades and get a bank palace instead; using large openings I designed a cheerful building, because the character of a bank is determined by a well-lit space where intensive work is done...

THE MAIN STAIRCASE ON THE DOROTTYA UTCA SIDE

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