Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
Section of the richly carved fürnitüre and wooden covering The Domestic Bank The head office of the Domestic Bank, which had been in business since 1884, was erected at the corner of Harmincad utca and Erzsébet tér right before the First World War. (At present the building houses the British Embassy). The bank’s headquarters, together with its own apartment house standing on its Erzsébet tér side, was constructed to plans by Károly Rainer. The major attraction of the building, the cashier’s hall in the covered courtyard, has survived virtually intact with the exception of the missing furniture. The method applied here, whose result became a familiar sight to many when the British Council Library was housed here, is perhaps more impressive than anything used with glass domes of a similar function. We do not want to exaggerate and neither should we fall into the sin of blasphemy, but we can say that one is bound to be struck by a sense of pious awe on entering the so called grand cashier’s hall of this new bank. The same kind of awe is inspired in the observer on being exposed to the beauties of world-famous churches or strolling through the halls of a splendid museum, where paintings and sculptures proclaim the immortality of genius. It goes without saying that it is not by the mystique of money or the adoration involuntarily felt for the golden calf that one is overcome in these luxurious and yet decorous, infinitely artistic and yet reservedly solemn rooms; what sublimes one’s emotions into those of pious amazement is that when 60
