Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)

try-shops in Budapest. Between 1911 and 1913 Gerbeaud had the whole building reconstructed by the architect Sándor Fellner, who created the elegant metropolitan style of the ground floor by adding a frontage (built by Gyula Jungfer) made of fine materials. At that time the confectionery only occupied the right-hand third of the fagade overlooking the square, so there was room for two more outlets to its left. Alterations carried out in the 1930s damaged the shopfronts built by Fellner (a modern bus stop was built in the place of Zoltán Braumann’s knitwear shop), then the war and subsequent reconstruction wrought further damage. Only the arched glass of the “Little Gerbeaud” frontage on the side fagade remained in its original state. In the 1960s the three fagades overlooking the streets were deprived of their remaining ornaments. In the meantime, the confectionery kept expanding and by 1981 it had taken over the whole frontal fagade of the building.

Gereben chose to use the 1912 condition of the confectionery as the basis of restoration because it was at that time that “Gerbeaud” had its golden age and the period reflected the atmosphere of the “good old days” and the richness of a bygone bourgeois life-style. The new design, however, was not an accurate reconstruction. Such fidelity was out of the question as there was more than one business operating behind the fagade in 1912, while in 1981 the confectionery alone occupied the entire space. There was no need, for example, to have as many entrances as there used to be, yet the management at that time requested an entrance in the central axis of the building, where there had not been one before. It was also a newly requested feature to have shop windows which could be removed in favourable weather. The construction industry of the early 1980s was capable of doing much less than that of the turn of the century. Whether one likes it or not, the new shopfront reflects the realities of its age. The architect reconstructed the design created by Fellner in so far as he built an added shopfront among the projections, whose main features and materials are the same as those of the old one (the upper part of the metal frontage is divided and the whole is covered with red granite). However, what one can see behind the windows is not goods but the original stone framed apertures of the neo-Classical building, presented by the architect as “relics of the past” to the passers-by. The two layers - the windows evoking the turn of the century and the rediscovered neo-Classical fagade 42