Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
same journal give the assumption the lie: in these it is clearly visible that the vessel of the external gutter is no more than half a metre below the moulding of the parapet. The house was then one of the very first modern buildings of Budapest and yet it failed fully to satisfy the emerging canons of the time. "Appended to the overall shape conceived in accordance with up-to-date ideái are ómait details which rather unfortunately alter the general impression that a modern approach would otherwise create. These details are to a certain measure remnants of the Romanticism of the recent past and partly the symptoms of unthinking routine. These symptoms can be observed about the stylized cock-motifs decorating the iron arch reaching over the terrace for no conceivable reason. Even more glaring examples of the same fault are the schematic pedestals and mouldings on the terrace pillars, something that can, in all likelihood, be blamed on the on-site builders. Other critics have also censured the window shutters, but we on our part, consider these to be well-tried, serviceable fittings, so why should they not be employed? The same cannot be said for the apparently improvised glass marquise!” Was it indeed a matter of Romanticism and improvisation here? Closer familiarity with Lessner's thinking will show that it is by not the case. Manó Lessner (1884-1944) was a contemporary of Willem Marinus Dudok's and Max Taut’s in Europe and of Károly Kós’s and Lajos Kozma's in Hungary, a classmate of the latter in Győr. He took his degree at the Munich Technische Hochschule in 1906. In 1919 he was appointed member of the Museum and Arts Directorate of the Hungarian Republic of Soviets, in which position he kept threatening the community of the country’s architects with the prospect of instituting censorship to uphold quality standards and of ordering the enforced demolition of buildings spoiling the cityscape. After the fall of the Soviet Republic, he was barred from the Association of Engineers and Architects and he was not given membership of the Chamber of Engineers either. In the early twenties he worked in Dezső Meilers studio, later he entered into partnership with Kálmán Széllé, who he had a deep impression on. (Szelle built the studio-house of the painter István Szőnyi in Zebe- gény in the shape of those characterising Lessner’s work.) Very few of his designs were to be realized (a winepress house near Zalaegerszeg, another in Badacsony, a resort house for children in Keszthely and a villa in Eszter utca, on Rózsa Hill), but most of his designs are of considerable interest. Their unconventional allotment of masses, their apparently random but very often playful details make them stand apart from both the modern and the traditional buildings of the period. 10
