The Tragic Genius of Architect Ödön Lechner

Even if you aren’t especially interested in architecture, there are three buildings in Budapest that might make you stop to take a moment to observe. They were designed by Ödön Lechner (1845-1914), one of the seminal architects of Hungary; Lechner dismissed the Revival Style as being thoughtless imitation, whether neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance or neo-Baroque. Nor did he think much of Hungary’s architectural legacy. The medieval Gothic style never reached the heights that it did in France and Germany, he argued, and the Ottoman and Habsburg occupations impaired the growth of the Renaissance and the Baroque. But now was time for a change.

Lechner came of age after the 1867 creation of Austria-Hungary, a period of rapid economic growth coupled with strong political nationalism. Artists and architects actively explored ways in which a national style might be established.

“How does a national style form? By shaping the great European art movements with the natural instincts of folk art. Our folk art has preserved its native character for centuries; our decorative motifs have always existed among craftsmen, in the works of potters, embroiderers, carpenters, and goldsmiths,” Lechner wrote in 1902.

It took decades for Lechner to find his voice. Straight out of architecture school in Budapest and Berlin, in the 1860s, he designed the type of Revival buildings he would later frown upon. After a three-year sojourn in Paris spent on castle renovations, his works showed the influence of French palace architecture to the point that a Loire Valley chateaux inspired his designs for the apartment complex commissioned by the Hungarian national railway company, MÁV, in the early 1880s. Located across from the Budapest Opera, it is a jewel of Budapest's Andrássy Avenue, housing a W Hotel currently. But Lechner’s style was to drastically evolve.

The Europe-wide spread of the Art Nouveau in the early 1890s liberated Lechner from historicist architecture. The Art Nouveau meant different things to different people, but its common thread was a desire to break with the past. Hence its manyfold labels: Neue Kunst (new art), Jugendstil (youth style), Secessionist style (the style of the break-away).

In his quest to create a Hungarian national architecture, Lechner found inspiration in Central Asian folk motifs, relying on the (mistaken) findings of ethnographer József Huszka, who claimed that Hungarian tribes had culturally overlapped with Persian and Indian people. These half-baked theories provided a convenient basis for framing Hungary as a nation distinct from Germanic culture. “I was fascinated by these Eastern relations because they could guide my effort to plant folk motifs into monumental architecture.”

These architectural influences are most notable on the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts (1891-1896) with its lavish green-and-gold tiled dome and richly ornamented entrance portal complete with lush floral patterns. Lechner later admitted that he might have gone too far, calling the entrance “a bit too Indian.” The building was nothing short of revolutionary at the time and most critics praised Lechner's efforts. Unfortunately the museum is currently under renovation and can't be accessed.

Lechner's approach to building materials also deviated from the standard. The practice at the time was to mask decorative details – columns, pediments, cornices, window surrounds – in plaster, since stone was too expensive. “Plaster and other fashionable techniques can be excusable on cheaper buildings, but they can’t be the starting point of new artistic forms,” he wrote in a 1911 essay. His solution? Glazed ceramics, which he believed was more compatible with Hungary’s natural resources. “Most of the country consists of a huge flatland whose residents have barely heard of stone, let alone used it on buildings. On the other hand, ceramics is an ancient craft and decorative elements can be easily made from it.”

Lechner applied ceramic ornaments with such gusto and flourish that his buildings today are best known for these colorful details. He developed a successful collaboration with the Pécs-based Zsolnay, a big company that patented and manufactured elaborate shapes of glazed ceramics called pyrogranite – “granite” referred to the material's strength and durability – for buildings across Austria-Hungary.

In Zsolnay, Lechner found a professional supplier that was able to deliver on his precise specifications, be it an idiosyncratic floral pattern or a roof tile with an unexpected shade of green (Lechner’s father owned a brick factory, so Lechner knew enough about ceramics to appreciate Zsolnay's quality and craftsmanship). It turns out that Zsolnay’s non-porous decorations were much more resistant to the cold and polluted city air than plaster ornaments which have since disintegrated from wall surfaces and often dangle alarmingly from building facades as a quick walk in Budapest can attest.

The Postal Savings Bank (1900-1901) in Budapest's city center is considered Lechner’s masterpiece. He eliminated most classical elements – there's no cornice, for example – and designed an astonishing building that defies easy categorization or comparison. Gentle brick patterns and Zsolnay’s pyrogranite decorations brighten up the immense facade which is capped by a playfully undulating battlement.

Unusual creatures appear throughout, some with obvious meanings such as the bees crawling toward their beehives that represent diligence and savings, others the offsprings of Lechner’s roving mind – snakes, dragons, and predatory birds. Lechner planted a mystical, archaic wonderland into a narrow Budapest side street. “He believed in the expressive power of architectural forms, in their symbolic and magical force,” wrote János Gerle, the editor of a 2003 book called “Ödön Lechner.” The building belongs to the State Treasury and can’t be visited unfortunately. Your best option for a glimpse would be the rooftop bar of the Hotel President across the street.

Perhaps paradoxically, Lechner was a staunch modernist when it came to building technologies. During his years in Western Europe, he learned about the latest developments including the use of steel and reinforced concrete. The Museum of Applied Arts, whose inauguration was attended by Hungary's King, Franz Joseph, was one of the first in Hungary to feature steel supports and a massive steel-framed glass roof.

The strength of steel enabled Lechner to span longer spaces and create intricate spatial connections that were a hallmark of the Art Nouveau. Nikolaus Pevsner, the prominent 20th-century architectural historian, compared Lechner’s brilliant use of skylights to Le Corbusier’s lighting solutions at the Ronchamp chapel.

For much of his life, Lechner battled serious headwinds from the conservative architectural establishment and the Hungarian state. In theory, his national style aligned with the popular anti-Austrian sentiments, but he was viewed as a reformer and a member of the "decadent" Art Nouveau, which people associated with Austria (ironically, Lechner didn’t think much of the Austrian Art Nouveau and its most famous practitioner, Otto Wagner). Lechner's main adversaries were Alajos Hauszmann, the esteemed professor of architecture at the Budapest University of Technology, and Ignác Alpár, a prolific and politically connected architect.

Commissions at the turn of the century became increasingly politicized, and architects split into pro- and anti-Lechner camps. Lechner, by nature reserved and far from a shrewd politician, lost major commissions, including the 1899 design for the Budapest Stock Exchange on Liberty Square which went to Alpár. After 1900, few assignments came his way. For a long time, he held out hope that the Ministry of Culture would create for him a chair at the Academy of Fine Arts as was the case with Otto Wagner in Vienna, providing him an official platform to disseminate his ideas about national architecture. But it never came to be.

Art Nouveau turned out to be short-lived and by the first decade of the 20th century European architecture moved away from Lechner's playful individualism toward calmer and less ornate buildings. This was foreign territory to Lechner and soon he was irretrievably sidelined. In his last built work, an apartment complex in Irányi utca (1910-1911), he tried to fuse the latest fashions of the Austrian Art Nouveau with his own style, but the result is less than convincing.

During the last decades of his life, Lechner became a constant presence at the Japán coffeehouse on Andrássy Avenue, where he shared a table with his famous artist friends such as József Rippl-Rónai and occasionally mentored young architects. He would use the marble tabletops to sketch down his ideas. According to an anecdote, when Marcell Nemes, the great art collector, saw Lechner’s drawings for a memorial of Queen Sisi, he immediately bought the whole table from the café.

But this was far from the victory lap of a national hero enjoying the sunny years of retirement. Lechner suffered terribly from having been marginalized. In an obituary – Lechner died in 1914 – one of his followers, Béla Jánszky, recalled how Lechner would regularly burst into tears about his broken career. Lechner’s mature period yielded only four public buildings, none from the last decade and a half of his life. Painfully few for a visionary architect whose peak coincided with Budapest's construction boom.

Lechner had an immense influence on the next generation, but his pupils took his vision to different directions. József Vágó migrated toward Otto Wagner’s late-period Viennese Art Nouveau; Béla Lajta and Béla Málnai dropped most ornaments and made a name for themselves as pre-moderns; while Károly Kós shifted to a vernacular based on the traditional buildings of Transylvania. Lechner’s buildings were so personal that those who tried to remain completely loyal to his architecture – such as Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab – often struggled to carry the torch.

What does this mean for Lechner’s legacy? Was he only a short-lived star on the horizon of Hungarian architecture? Dezső Ekler, one of Hungary’s top architects today, doesn’t think so. “Even more so than his buildings, I consider Lechner’s greatest legacy his innovations and his research. He viewed architecture as a language and he systematically tried to renew it to find Hungary’s voice in it,” he wrote to me. “Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to build more, which is the likely reason he remains relatively unknown outside of Hungary.”

This link will help you find each of Lechner's major Budapest builings.