Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
variety of basic services to choose from was kept up by pseudo-advertisements such as the inane commercial ditty: When you arrive, when you leave, Remember the Savings Cooperative... New perspectives opened up for the quality as well as the plurality of business life in the late seventies. The first indication of the new openness was the appearance of quality OTP branches. That this occurred simultaneously with the arrival of the first multinational banks in Hungary cannot have been coincidental, even though the latter were only allowed to operate within narrow limits. At the same time, the number of domestic banks also multiplied, and the form of ownership was also transformed. Today’s yellow pages list some seventy financial institutions, which may not be a wholly reliable indication of the actual number of Hungarian banks, as about two thirds of these directory entries cover the local branches of foreign businesses. The bank constructions of the past five or six years, whose number has exceeded anything that occurred earlier, can be classified into the following major types: 1. The complete and faithful reconstruction of apartment buildings erected in the nineteenth century. The new function provides a chance of survival for the building, but it also necessitates a major restructuring of its interior spaces or even a complete alteration of their character. Credit Lyonnnais, for example, has reconstructed an 1833 neo-classicist building by Lőrinc Zo- fahl, at no. 7 József nádor tér, while the Postal Bank has done the same to the Blumenstöckl House, a building dating from the same period, across the square. At the corner of Andrássy út and Káldy utca the local headquarters of the International Nederlanden Bank has been constructed into the mansion at no. 9. With this, in place of the former courtyard, an interesting atrium with additional storeys has been created to enrich the existing sight with traits characteristic of contemporary Dutch architecture. A head office for Budapest Bank in Honvéd utca has been created by reconstructing a multi-functional building originally erected in the style of late historicism. 2. The acquisition of buildings that earlier served as headquarters of various public institutions (sometimes in the field of finances); this usually involves only minor reconstruction. (Ownership of the above-mentioned Financial Institutions Centre has been transferred from 65
