Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
and classical window frames. Its interior is a typical example of the bank building described in the introduction above; the cashier’s hall, which fills the entire courtyard, is covered by a trapezoid tinted glass ceiling. The patterns and golden colours of the foyer are especially delicate. In the second-floor foyer, from where open the management offices of the present owner, the National Savings Bank or OTP, there is a small internal museum with some graceful pieces of the original furniture. There must have been a similar tension between the exteriors and interiors of Italian Renaissance palaces. The renovation of the cashier’s hall, carried out in the eighties to plans by Antal Lázár, preserved the original furnishing into which elements of a new style but similar quality were blended. Budapest Bank Standing at no. 6 Nádor utca, this bank, better known by its later name Czech-Hungarian Industrial Bank, is yet another, no less different, exception. In the 1911 competition, whose jury included Ignác Alpár and Béla Lajta, plans submitted by Gyula Haász and Béla Málnai on the one hand, and by Sándor Heidelberg on the other were found to provide a suitable basis for a design combining the merits of both entries. The former proposed a puritanical facade with toned-down, neoclassical ornamentation, while the latter would have shown off exuberant Art Nouveau forms-somewhat “old fashioned” at the time. The three architects’ joint design was almost entirely based on the Málnai-Haász concept. The end product is referred to, in the international as well as Hungarian literature, as the most significant precursor of Hungarian modernism. The unadorned facade, covered by smooth slabs of stone and articulated by identical window apertures, reminds one of the remarks made about Otto Wagner’s designs a decade earlier. It follows from the position of the street corners that the only accentuated element to relieve the bulk of the massive building is the row of oriel windows with their metal-plate covering. By contrast, the wooden windows of the ground and first floors, which belong to the bank, are jam-packed with the overflowing ornamentation of a late Art Nouveau style made after drawings by designer Gyula Tálos. The cashier’s hall, located behind the facade overlooking Mérleg utca and thus lit both from the street and from the courtyard, is provided with the same richly carved wooden fittings, of which the 58
