Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
Fonciére Insurance Company and in February 1881 tenders were invited — something quite unusual at the time. The plot, ending in acute angle, suggested putting the emphasis on the endpoint of the trapezoid shape. The difficult task turned out to be an irresistible architectural challenge. As many as 58 designs were entered (compared to a mere 19 entries when tenders for the Parliament Building were invited three years later). Four designs were awarded prizes by the jury of renowned Hungarian and Austrian architects, with the commission going to Adolf Feszty. Competitors Ödön Lechner, Zsigmond Quittner and Gyula Pártos were later invited to make their contribution at other points of Sugárút. Adolf Feszty cut off the acute angle of the plot and designed a richly decorated fafade to be raised on the resulting plane. The front, on which columns, loggias and aedicules alternated, was to be topped with a dome-shaped roof. The function of the building was indicated by the figure of Hermes placed on the apex of the gable topping the portal that embraced the two upper storeys. (Deprived of its dome-like roofing the structure appears to be truncated today.) This was no refined architecture: it was too much of a good thing crammed together by the designer. The two long over-articulated street-fronts fail to add up to a unified whole. As noted above, four to five storey houses were allowed along the first section of Sugárút. This size, unless the construction was designed to be an office block, meant apartment blocks at the end of the 19th century, as it does today. Four-storey buildings standing in close file were not built by anyone to be used as a private mansion. This did not, however, mean that many of those who had ordered the construction would not want to live here. Thus the cross between the block of flats and the private residential building came into being. (The resulting apartment mansion is not to be mistaken for the mansion-style apartment house, a construction despised by many a contemporary critic, which had the external appearance of an elegant mansion with simple rented flats on the inside.) The distinctive feature of these apartment mansions was a huge, palatial apartment stretching along an entire floor with higher ceilings than elsewhere, which was sometimes accessible via a separate entrance and stairway. On the upper storeys were the conventional, but also high quality, rented flats. The first apartment mansion in the row belonged to András Saxlehner (No. 3 Andrássy út). The 1200-square-metre plot, which fronted on two streets, was so expensive that the Board took a particularly long time selling it. Anxious that no building might be standing on the plot by the time the avenue was opened, which would considerably spoil the overall impression, the board considered, in the autumn of 1882, having a building, possibly a hotel, erected on the property all by itself. That was when Saxlehner appeared on the scene to pay 163,358 11
