Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
The story goes that a few years before the turn of the century, at a time when the spectacular rejuvenation of the fine city of Pest was well under way, that a certain merchant, one Gyula Takáts, arrived from Transylvania with no more than a battered satchel hanging on his side, but with the aim of becoming rich through his own efforts. From the takings of his Fekete Elefánt (Black Elephant) delicatessen store Gyula Takáts had a palatial apartment block built on the corner of Váci utca and Duna utca, on the huge dome of which gold coins from Körmöc reflected the sun’s rays, thus proclaiming to all and sundry the pride of this bourgeois, who dared rank himself with kings in shaping the appearance of his home. The fashion was not unknown in Europe, but the intensity and the narrow temporal limits of its application were without precedent. Without doubt, Budapest certainly did become a metropolis in the last quarter of the 19th century, populated by the bourgeoisie or even the haute bourgeoisie, the latter being a product of the more fortunate family careers. In its choice of ornamentation the bourgeoisie, by no means characterised by modesty in its ambitions and the way it proclaimed those ambitions, followed the example set by those going before it in rank and in history. Thus its houses were decorated with turrets and domes and other ornaments, often intended to be elegant, but which were much like paste in comparison with genuine diamonds. Yet even if the bourgeois taste was sometimes unsure, there was nothing spurious about the attitude to life behind it. In what follows we have limited our choice of roof ornaments to those decorating once privately-owned buildings connected to known individuals as well as, for the sake of comparison, domes on mansions that formerly belonged to the aristocracy. Hence public buildings have been omitted, although many of these, at least the ones erected in the same period of urban development, display the same features. The Second World War erased from the skyline the contours of the roofing that had topped Gyula Takáts’s building. However, elsewhere in the city you can still see the architectural decorations on the top of the houses of the bourgeoisie, features of little structural but powerful prestige-related significance. What else can have motivated the owner who ordered such elaborately useless things composed of latticed spires, carefully carved stones, beams joined by clever tendons and mortises, sophisticated shell roofs and tinplate profiles other than to attract attention by saying: “Look up and see: here 1 am!”? 5
