Visit to Budapest

There is an enticing article in today's LA Times travel section on Budapest, with special emphasis on art nouveau style found about the city.

Budapest, So Nouveau, LA Times



Photo credit Tomas Opitz


A clip from the article here -

Budapest, so Nouveau
A cache of architectural treasures is the Hungarian capital's gift to visitors.
By Susan Spano, Times Staff Writer
October 1, 2006

TWO remarkable things happened in Budapest around 1900: The city shot up almost overnight, and Art Nouveau arrived, reshaping the face of Hungary's capital along glorious new lines.

It was a happy coincidence for Budapest then and for visitors now, especially those who have a passion for Art Nouveau, which put its richly ornamental stamp on buildings, furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles and jewelry.

People make special trips to see Art Nouveau ?- to Prague, Czech Republic; Paris; Brussels; and Barcelona, Spain, but they rarely think of Budapest, known more for its old castle, a medieval set piece overlooking the Danube River. Beyond it, though, another ravishing Art Nouveau Budapest awaits, testifying to the city's blossoming and the beauty of the style that marked it.

At the time, Art Nouveau was swirling across Europe replacing such staid, derivative styles as neogothic with idiosyncratic architecture and gracefully abstracted floral motifs. It took distinctive forms in the many countries where it became popular. The style incorporated themes from folk culture and mythology in Germany, where it was known as Jugendstil. In France, where architect Hector Guimard created writhing, wrought-iron entrances to the Paris Métro, it was more floral and feminine. In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí turned the facades of buildings into melting ice cream.

Hungarian Art Nouveau, especially as practiced by architect Odon Lechner, had an operatic, almost cartoonish flair, though the style's various tendencies all soon arrived in Budapest and blended. It was a wide-open canvas for the modern style, a city growing like a colt economically and culturally, the Continent's Chicago.

Today, instances of Art Nouveau are widely scattered throughout the city, which means long but tonic walks and rides on subways and trams for those seeking them.

The city's remarkable growth ?- in the 25 years that preceded the turn of the 20th century, the population tripled and the number of buildings doubled ?- was spurred by a variety of factors. The Compromise of 1867 figured chief among them. It made the country an almost equal partner in a dual monarchy ruled by Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, who was crowned king of Hungary the same year. Financial institutions and foreign capital flowed into Budapest. It got a sophisticated drinking-water system, electric trolleys, an opera house, parliamentary building, broad boulevards and a city park.

From Buda to Pest

AS my plane descended last month, I caught sight of the city clustered around a sweeping Danube River S-curve, as elegant as any designed by Tiffany or Lalique. With its varied skyline, seven distinctive bridges, waterfront walkways and trams, Budapest does justice to its wide, fair stretch of the river. Old Buda decorates the hills to the west, a beguiling panorama and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Newer Pest, where most of the city's Art Nouveau architecture is concentrated, lines the river on the east, officially united with its neighbor in 1873.

Modern Hungary joined the European Union in 2004. It has 2 million people, traffic jams and construction sites. Experts say its bubble economy has burst, and last month when Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany admitted he had lied about the state of the economy to win the election, the city erupted in protests, some of them violent.

But the turmoil remained under the surface during my visit and had further subsided last week after protests Sept. 23. So the city worked its old-world charms on me. If you visit in rose-tinted glasses, as I did, it isn't hard to imagine civil and genteel Budapest circa 1900. Bells still tinkle in the doorways of little shops; yellow trolleys clatter along the boulevards; people spend the afternoon in coffeehouses and make phone calls from old-fashioned yellow-and-green booths.

In a minibus from the airport, I saw a complex of concrete-block apartments, an architectural legacy of the Communist era that circled other cities in Eastern Europe in high-rise housing projects. But central Budapest managed to evade large-scale desecration, practicing a somewhat relaxed form of Soviet bloc ideology known as Goulash Communism.

The city did not escape the ravages of World War II. During the 1944 siege, house-to-house battles raged between advancing Soviet troops and desperately retreating Germans. Seventy percent of the city was damaged; the Royal Palace on Castle Hill burned; all seven bridges crumbled into the Danube.

At the Gresham Palace, one of the first Art Nouveau buildings in Budapest, stained glass cracked, and an entrance gate was torn off its hinges. Miraculously, though, it survived the war.

Built by a London-based insurance company as luxury apartments, Gresham Palace has a dripping, Gaudí-esque facade, with two towers and abundant sculptural decoration. The grand entrance, with its massive, wrought-iron gate, originally led to a T-shaped shopping passage, paved in then-state-of-the-art asphalt and topped by a soaring glass roof.

It's still thrilling to arrive at the Gresham Palace because, after years of neglect, it underwent a five-year renovation and opened in 2004 as a Four Seasons hotel. The T-shaped arcade is now a sumptuous lobby lined with pale green tiles made by Hungary's celebrated Zsolnay Ceramics Factory. Gabor Kruppa, the architect in charge of the renovation, told me by phone later that about half the tiles were original, as were many of the exquisite stained-glass windows made by the renowned Budapest workshop of Miksa Roth.

Kruppa and his team painstakingly preserved many of the building's late 19th century features, replacing crumbling tiles, recasting ironwork, restoring its etched and stained-glass windows. But the interior décor is contemporary, with Art Nouveau echoes, like the white-and-black mosaic floor of the lobby and elegant wood guest-room doorways. Only in the ground-floor Gresham-Venezia Cafe did they attempt to re-create the original as a tribute to a group of Hungarian artists called the Gresham Circle that met here in the 1920s.

On my first night in Budapest, I had dinner in the cafe, beginning with a glass of Hungarian Sauvignon Blanc from the Lake Balaton region. The entrée was paprika chicken with spaetzle and sauce swirled across the plate in Art Nouveau fashion.

The Gresham Palace is the most architecturally distinguished among a handful of luxury hotels on the Danube Corso, a sequence of terraces overlooking the Pest side of the river that's traversed by tram No. 2, a sightseer's delight. Nearby are other landmarks, including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1825; Chain Bridge, the first permanent link between Buda and Pest, completed in 1849; and the Hungarian Parliament building.

Soon after my arrival, I toured the Parliament, a huge, neogothic homage to Westminster Palace in London that opened in 1902. With its ersatz medieval spires and statuary, it would have seemed hopelessly out of date by the time it was completed, an excellent example of everything Art Nouveau opposed.

(this clip was page 1 of 3 in the article - much more info in the next two pages)