Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
unsatisfactory. In 1896, the year of the Millenary Celebrations, the society had built the new Palace of Arts in Heroes’ Square. By this time the building housing the Museum and School of Applied Arts in Üllői út had also been completed, and the institution that had rented the ground-floor room had moved out of the premises. It was hard to find a new function. The ground-floor area was converted into a studio theatre, where the Andrássy út Theatre operated at first to be succeeded by the State Puppet Theatre. In its exhibition halls the New Hungarian Picture Gallery opened in the 1930s. Then it lost its function for decades again, until it was taken over by the College of Fine Arts, which has been using it for exhibits presenting the past and present of the college itself. Loosely modelled on the Palazzo Bevilaqua in Verona, the Old Palace of Arts is a harmonious construction designed with much care in its every detail, and is thus a significant work of Adolf Lang. Its staircase and upstairs lobby are decorated with frescos by Károly Lotz. The building that houses the University of Fine Arts was designed in 1876 by Lajos Rauscher, a Stuttgart-born architect, who settled in Pest permanently. Contemplating the simple monumentality of the building, one cannot but wonder why Rauscher failed to receive, or accept, commissions for further designs. He worked for decades as a recognised painter of ornamental works and cityscapes as well as a teacher of the Drawing School and then the University of Technology, not to mention his membership of several juries, but no other architectural works of his are known. He decorated the fafade of the Drawing School itself with his sgraffiti, as he did the Pensions Administration Mansion of the Hungarian Railways on the Körönd or the former Edelsheim-Gyulay Villa, which closed the left-hand side of the avenue and was pulled down sixty years ago. The block between Izabella utca and Rózsa utca houses the headquarters of the Hungarian Railway Company. This is the third public building along Andrássy út which has retained its function ever since it was first opened. It was designed in 1876 by Gyula Rochlitz, head of the above-ground construction department of the Railway Company. Three buildings rise above the rest on the left-hand side of the avenue. In 2002 the ill-famed building at No. 60 Andrássy út was given extra visual emphasis with a heavy-handed architectural gesture. What used to be a nondescript four-storey building with an interior courtyard girdled by the customary outside corridors has come to symbolise the political terror of the 1940s and 1950s as in 1944 it housed the headquarters of the fascist Arrow Cross Party, called 'The House of Loyalty’, and later was taken over by the secret police, the ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság — literally, State Security Authority) which used it until 1956. Once owned by master builder János Bobula, the building at No. 62 catches the eye with its fafade featuring a loggia. The building at the corner of 36
