Budapest's Art Nouveau Architecture - Budapest - page 416

ern end of VI Izabella utca at No 94 is the restored Lindenbaum apartment block , the first
in the city to use Art Nouveau ornamentation, including suns, stars, peacocks, flowers,
snakes, foxes and long-tressed nudes.
The master of the style, however, was Ödön Lechner: his most ambitious work in Bud-
apest is the Museum of Applied Arts . Purpose built as a gallery and completed in time for
the millenary exhibition in 1896, it was faced and roofed in a variety of colourful Zsolnay
ceramic tiles, and its turrets, domes and ornamental figures lend it an Eastern or Mogul feel.
His crowning glory (though not seen as such at the time), however, is the sumptuous Royal
Postal Savings Bank , a Secessionist extravaganza of floral mosaics, folk motifs and ceramic
figures just off Szabadság tér in Lipótváros and dating from 1901.
The Ferenc Liszt Music Academy , completed in 1907, is interesting not so much for its
exterior as for its interior decorative elements. There's a dazzling Art Nouveau mosaic
called Art Is the Source of Life by Aladár Kőrösfői Kriesch, a leader of the seminal Gödöllő
Artists' Colony, on the 1st-floor landing and some fine stained glass by master craftsman
Miksa Róth, whose home and workshop in central Pest is now a museum . In the music
academy take a look at the grid of laurel leaves below the ceiling of the main concert hall,
which mimics the ironwork dome of the Secession Building (1897-1908) in Vienna, and the
large reflecting sapphire-blue Zsolnay ball finials on the stair balusters.
The Danubius Hotel Gellért , designed by Ármin Hegedűs, Artúr Sebestyén and Izidor
Sterk in 1909 but not completed until 1918, contains examples of late Art Nouveau, notably
the thermal spa with its enormous arched glass entrance hall and Zsolnay ceramic fountains
in the bathing pools. The architects were clearly influenced by Lechner but added other ele-
ments, including baroque ones.
Very noteworthy indeed is the arcade near V Ferenciek tere called Párisi Udvar built in
1909 by Henrik Schmahl. The design contains a myriad influences - from Moorish Islamic
and Venetian Gothic architecture to elements of Lechner's own eclectic style.