Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

only because the stylistic features he uses, the patterns borrowed from old Hungarian embroidery and wood carving, which he developed and enlarged, are different from the forms used by other nations, but also, and mainly, because one does not find anything similar to the way Lechner uses them among the various national stylistic trends flourishing worldwide around the turn of the century. The regional variants which emphasise national characteristics had grown out of historicism everywhere, because what were regarded as suitable sources were the materials inherited from this or that glorious or particular historical period. Examples include the neo-Russian, neo-Byzantine, neo-Viking, neo- German, neo-Norman and similar trends. Beside these, mention must be made of the various movements which regarded local folk architecture as their starting point, and which intended to apply it to new functions, such as the endeavours hallmarked in Hungary by the name of Károly Kós. What set Lechner apart from all this was that he did not rely on architectonic prototypes but, instead, drew on the stylistic idiom of the arts and crafts, which he had to place into a new dimension for the purposes of architecture. That is why his work is so markedly different from the stylistic features of contemporaneous Secessionist and Art Nouveau masters. His art comprised two main constituents-it combined a modern functional approach and the employment of modern structures with an individual application of forms expressing the spirit of the people, which forms he enriched using his own, personal resources.

Here is a further extract from Ödön Gerő’s article cited above:

If the term “ frozen music” is applicable to anything at all, then it is surely applicable to the beautiful gable and the hoodmoulding, which proclaim a uirtual revelling in the art of drawing. This hoodmoulding is an affirmation of the joy felt by the artist upon finding the Hungarian rhythm of the line. It crowns the building, since recognising that rhythm is a crowning of all striving after a Hungarian decorative art.

Above the dynamic hoodmoulding which closes the facade, a roof section teeming with sculptural decoration almost surreal in its playfulness is visible—if not from immediately outside the building, then from streets farther away or from the rooftops. Where winged serpents wind around the pinnacles topping the two cor25