Fast Food and Fine Architecture
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
LETTER FROM BUDAPEST Fast Food and Fine Architecture By Ruth Ellen Gruber Budapest A friend of mine lives at one of the Hungarian capital's most famous intersections—where elegant Andrassy...
...Its flat facade, tiny windows and almost industrial-looking decorative elements foreshadow Art Deco, and it is topped by a frieze of stylized winged figures that could be angels carrying swords...
...So there was a good reason—and it was not the fast food—for my feeling that the modern parabolas visible all over the city, McDonald's Golden Arches, have a distinctly Budapest flavor...
...Before you guffaw, let me go on and you'll see why—as I myself did...
...A 1992 catalogue of those architects lists more than 200 of them...
...Some of the burial sites are marked with immense sculptural piles featuring sentimental figures floating up to heaven...
...The cemetery director forbade taking photographs, she said, because he did not want anyone to publicize the desolation...
...Kossuth opposed Deak's compromise and died in Turin in 1894, but his body was brought back to Budapest for an extraordinary three-day funeral...
...Ferenc Deak, the statesman who prepared the way for the l867 agreement that forged the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy...
...Given the general Cold War tensions of the time, eating there was quite a kick...
...Located just off Vaci Street, the impressive pedestrians-only shopping thoroughfare parallel to the Danube, it was an immediate hit...
...Moreover, whether a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Bob & Rob donuts, or another U.S...
...Yet my friend did not mention its beauty when he gave me directions to his apartment the first time I went there...
...For years after the Holocaust this cemetery, opened in 1874, remained abandoned...
...We wanted to make sure our colleagues got to see some of our respective favorites...
...and the legendary Lajos Kossuth, who became President in April of 1849 when the Hungarian Parliament declared the country an independent republic...
...There it was, too, in the buildings of the Budapest zoological gardens, put up in 1911, and in the Geliert Hotel and Baths, built between 1909 and 1918...
...Later, while looking through an architectural book for some details on Bela Lajta's work at the Jewish cemetery, I discovered that he had entered the competition to do Kossuth's mausoleum...
...Here lie Hungary's political and cultural elites: the writers, painters, poets, composers, prime ministers, scientists, and occasional women (such as the opera singer Lujza Blaha, known as "The Hungarian Nightingale") after whom Budapest's streets and squares are named...
...In August, after the Austrians again prevailed thanks to Russia's intervention, he was forced into exile...
...Instead, he said, "You won't have any trouble finding my place...
...chain, they always appear to be full of Hungarians, not merely tourists...
...Frequently they resembled sculptures as much as buildings...
...Efforts to clear parts of it have been made of late, but most of it is buried beneath a forest of trees, vines and wild bushes so thick that only the tops of some house-sized family crypts can be seen...
...I went first to the Kerepesi Jewish Cemetery, where Lajta designed the striking entryway and preburial hall, as well as at least nine or 10 of the immense mausoleums of well-todo Jewish noblemen, industrialists and bankers...
...As I continued to leaf through the book, I began to notice the parabolic figure again and again...
...In the 1890s he began using Hungarian folk designs, and often incorporated colorful ceramic tiles, in a deliberate attempt to cultivate a Hungarian national style...
...There it was as the entryway to a Reformed church by Aladar Arkay, built in 1913...
...My friend took us to the Academy of Music on Liszt Ferenc Square...
...Designed at the beginning of the century by Floris Korb and Kaiman Giergl, it combines gloriously sinuous lines with flamboyant decoration both inside and out...
...It shaped tomb stones and fire places, window frames and doorways, cupolas and rooflines...
...I remember how daring and exciting it seemed when, in the mid-1980s, this was the first Communist city to allow a McDonald's to open...
...Along with about two-thirds of the architects in the catalogue, Lajta was Jewish, and in common with many Hungarian Jews, he was assimilated...
...I insisted that we see the fantastic theater on Paulay Ede Street, conceived in 1910 by Bela Lajta as a nightclub...
...Today, many of the finest Art Nouveau buildings in Budapest are soot-covered and some are crumbling...
...It was an incredible outpouring of creativity, concrete and tile...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a co-respondent for The New Leader, based in Italy...
...But their decoration and even their placement make simply walking down many streets exciting...
...Carved from shiny smooth black marble, one of them features sculpted lions...
...This movement emerged from the work of Odon Lechner...
...another, two stylized birds with mournful, drooping heads...
...We journalists all queued up for a taste and then wrote stories about how the counter lines stretched back to the doorway, how it was hard to get a seat, and how the bathrooms were soclean...
...Sure enough, Oktogon has a Burger King, a Wendy's and, on the corner between them, a McDonald's...
...It appears to derive from a "'rick-form oven" that is part of the country's folk history...
...One wing of the station now contains what is probably the largest McDonald's in all of Budapest...
...Like that landmark, Nyugati's vast hall sits on an extraordinary iron framework that caused a great sensation in its time for its technical innovation...
...Two summers ago, a Budapest friend and I led a group of American academics on an after-dinner walk through the city following a daylong conference...
...A generation of his students and other contemporary architects then created an immense inventory of idiosyncratic structures infused with a distinctive local idiom...
...But recently I found myself thinking about how, perhaps uniquely, the Golden Arches fit into the overall urban scheme here...
...Hilly Buda, whose medieval core is backed by the elaborate villas of the nouveaux riches, sits high above the western side of the river...
...Angling through the warm night, we paused at the Nyugati (Western) Railway Station, a slightly earlier structure built between 1874 and 1877 by the company that shortly afterward erected the Eiffel Tower...
...That Sunday morning I saw an elderly man remove his hat as he approached the grave of novelist MorJokai...
...The McDonald's franchises are the most visible, as they are everywhere...
...Budapest, in fact, strikes me as having more American or American-style fast food places than any other European city I know...
...My passion, rather, is the architecture...
...As a result, Budapest's main cemeteries contain much sculptural and architectural art...
...I'm on the only comer that doesn't have a fast food joint...
...Called Oktogon for its shape, it is the size of a large town square and something of a feast for the eyes...
...Not long ago I spent a Sunday morning exploring them...
...I don't come to Budapest for the fast food, of course, even if on most of my trips I do somehow find myself drawn to a "McDonald's Euerem" for something cheap, quick and caloric...
...many are places of pilgrimage...
...His design—a massive structure with a tall dome the shape of a three-dimensional parabola—lost the competition...
...The author further noted that "a study of European architecture at the turn of the century" suggests "the parabolic arch may be a Hungarian specialty...
...The caretaker warned me that the place was a hangout for glue-sniffers and other riffraff—two of her dogs had even been stolen...
...His mausoleum, which took two years to build (1901 -03), is a large, thick platform supporting a miniatore Greekstyle marble temple topped by a winged bronze figure...
...Budapest spreads out on both sides of the Danube...
...Just around one corner is the historic Kerepesi Municipal Cemetery—a sort of cross between Westminster Abbey, Arlington National Cemetery and Père Lachaise in Paris...
...His original name was Leitersdorfer...
...During my visit I flushed out a pheasant...
...Ye Olde Original Budapest McDonald's still does a roaring business, but it has been joined by a swarm of other Golden Arches outlets big and small, sitdown and drive-through, around the city...
...On the Eastern side is Pest, developed mainly in the latter part of the 19th century...
...Like a large number of his peers, besides structures for the living he designed tombs...
...The three biggest tombs are those of Lajos Batthyany, hero of the 1848 revolution against the Hapsburgs and Prime Minister of the subsequent government...
...But according to the book this was the first time that the parabolic arch or dome made a distinct appearance in Hungarian architecture and it caught on instantly...
...It is a flat urban expanse that, among other things, showcases the innovative and fanciful Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture...
...LETTER FROM BUDAPEST Fast Food and Fine Architecture By Ruth Ellen Gruber Budapest A friend of mine lives at one of the Hungarian capital's most famous intersections—where elegant Andrassy Avenue crosses the bustling Grand Boulevard that curves through the heart of the city...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 7
