What is This? Learning about Hungarian Architecture in Timisoara

This is one of the first pictures I took of this dilapidated but enigmatic building.  It was March 2009 in Timisoara Romania, and I was fascinated with it--returning many times over the next 3 months (and during later visits) to look and take pictures of its various details.  But when I left Timisoara for the last time in 2015, I knew nothing more than I did when I first saw it: who made it, who lived there, when was it made, what style it was built in--all questions unanswered.  I now know a good deal more about this building, and I will tell you its story after a brief digression.

In the spring of 2009, my husband Tony was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Timisoara where he taught American literature at the University of the West.  I was on sabbatical.  I knew very little about Timisoara except that it was where the 1989 Revolution began.  I also knew vaguely and came to know intimately that Timisoara was notable for its turn-of-the-century architecture--estimated at 1400 buildings--the largest "patrimony" in Romania.   When we arrived in Timisoara in February 2009, it was very cold, snowy, and icy, thus not conducive to long walks.  I walked some in my neighborhood but never ventured much further afield.  By March the sun was shining and the snow mostly gone, so I decided to start exploring the city.

The old part of Timisoara is divided into four sections.  Cetate, where we lived, is the original Timisoara,  once surrounded by fortifications that, when finally removed, allowed urban expansion to the other side of the Bega river/canal.  This expansion resulted in the three other sections of central Timisoara; in chronological order Iosefin, Elisabetin, and Fabric.  In my first jaunt out, I consulted the short section in the Blue Guide to Romania on Timisoara's Art Nouveau architecture, grabbed a map, and took my first walk into the major architectural treasures across the Bega. My destination was Piata Plevni, which is known for its two "peacock houses," designed and built by Marton Gemeinhardt.  They are amazing, and I will do another post on them because they too were crucial to my understanding of Timisoara's architecture. 

On the way to the peacock houses, though, I walked down  what I thought to be Bul. 16 Decembrie 1989 (the name commemorating the revolution from Communism),  the main dividing street between Iosefin and Elisabetan, but which is actually Piata Sfanta Maria for two blocks before it becomes the Bul.16 Decembrie 1989. There (though I didn't know real address until much later) at Piata Sfanta Maria number 6, I first saw this building I came to love.  Why did I love it so much?  Over the months of my 2009 visit, and many other Fulbright visits in the years that followed, I have taken literally hundreds of pictures of this building.  I looked carefully and, thanks to the powerful lens on my camera, learned how to see details on a building such as this.  So here are some of the details that have allured me.  

First the beautiful circular window in the middle of the top of the facade.  Though it is broken and dirty, its shape and lines became for me one of the canonical emblems of Art Nouveau.

 Also the small symmetrical windows around the circle, and the tops of pediments that eventually run down the face of the building itself.

And the Art Nouveau motifs: organic imagery, flowing and intricately entwined lines (coup de fouet) and geometric symmetries.  

 

 

The more I looked, what at first seemed disparate elements came together for me in one aesthetic whole. 

The challenges I faced understanding this building were many.  First, I had to look beyond the grime and disrepair, so typical of Timisoara's architectural heritage.  Second, I had to "fill in the blanks" where some of the symmetries  were effaced.  (I talk more about this process in an earlier post, The Constructing Eye.) Third, I had to try to find information about this building. Here I went straight to the internet because I had no access to research in English on Timisoara architecture.  Eventually I did learn (and I am now embarrassed to admit it) that Timisoara was part of Hungary until the end of the first world war and was called Temesvar.  Even with this information I could get little information of any detail.  There were, I was sure, physical archives, but searching these with no Romanian or Hungarian was not an option.  So I just kept looking.  As I looked and scoured what little information I could find, I decided that the style was a blend of Eclectic Historicism and Art Nouveau and that it was probably built around 1900.  

But between 2009 and now things have changed.  I had found out a lot more about Hungarian architecture of the period, reading everything I could find in English.  Also, Timisoara is going to be the European Cultural Capital in 2021, and an influx of money has spruced the city up.  Many buildings (but not this one) have been renovated.  Also, as in Hungary, many of the archives have been digitized and though accessing them is not easy, there now are blogs and websites built by people who have gone through archives, that provide some context and history for some of Timisoara's notable architecture.  

A few weeks ago, for some reason I started thinking about Timisoara, and plugged a couple of street addresses into google.  There I found two extremely interesting sites: a wikiwand site for Iosefin and Elisabeta and a site called Heritage of Timisoara .  The first covers more buildings, but the second provides more detail. Both agree on the following facts.  The building pictured above is called Palatal  Istvan Nemes: the bottom floor housed shops,  and the upper floors were apartments.  It was built in 1902, in the Art Nouveau style and the role of architect is attributed to Lipot Baumhorn.   The Heritage of Timisoara describes the building as follows:

Built in the 1900s style, the István Nemes Apartment Building has three storeys and closes the perspective of the Gheorghe Doja Street.  The roof area is decorated with pediments typical of the architecture at beginning of the 20th century, decorated with Art Nouveau elements. The facade is adorned with phytomorphic ornaments, in particular lines ending in whip-like curves (coup de fouet), as well as with anthropomorphic and geometric ornaments.  The ground floor of the building, meant for commercial purposes, has been modified and no longer reads as one unit. . . .  The land was bought by István Nemes from Timisoara City Hall in 1902, valuing 8556 crowns. The palace was erected in the same year in just 7 months (April 16 - November 5, 1902).

I could find no further information about Istvan Nemes of Temesvar.  But I did know quite a bit about Lipot Baumhorn, and connecting him to the Palatal Nemes was a significant find.  

Baumhorn was a Hungarian architect best known for building synagogues, many but not all of which still stand.  His most famous synagogue is the Szeged Synagogue, which is magnificent.  He also built a synagogue in the Fabric section of Timisoara.  It is incredibly beautiful but also incredibly endangered, and no entrance is allowed.  From the outside:

Baumhorn actually built quite a lot in Timisoara, including the Palatal Apelor from 1900, and located right down the street from the Palatal Nemes at Piata Sfanta Maria 2.    

The attribution of the Palatal Nemes to Baumhorn is, from what little I could gather, based primarily on similarities of style with other work by Baumhorn.  You can decide for yourself.  But here are two small figures, the first from the Palatal Apelor and the second from Palatal Nemes .

That day in March when I first visited Iosefin, I saw many buildings that were to become equally treasured.  But my main impression of the day was the sheer magnitude of what I was seeing.  Street after street of buildings: some (most) in decay, some (fewer) renovated.  It was as though I had stumbled into another world entirely.

Navigating those streets, throughout all four of Timisoara's historic areas, became an intellectual and aesthetic adventure.  The more I looked, the more I found patterns and differences.  This first immersion into Hungarian architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the source of all that I would later learn of the extraordinary phenomena of architectural change that spanned the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as western Europe and the world beyond (e.g., Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Lima and more).  

Just a couple of weeks before we left Timisoara in June 2009, Tony found, bought, and carried back to the US a big book about turn of the century architecture (e.g., Art Nouveau, Secession, Jugendstil, Liberty):  When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath 1867-1933, by Anthony Alofsin, published by University of Chicago Press in 2006.  It was my first introduction to real scholarship.  Reading Alofsin gave me a kind of clarity which I had previously lacked and led me to a bibliography of other such scholarship. This scholarship underpins my understanding of the buildings I fell in love with.  But the first level immersion--based on intense looking--remains for me as indispensable as anything I read.  It endows what I learned from reading with detail, nuance, and passion.

There are many more conventionally beautiful buildings in Timisoara, and I am contemplating more posts.  In another future post, I am going to try to explain why I became a kind of amateur historian of Hungary's architectural heritage. Why it is important, to me, to rescue a building from (my own sense of) anonymity--giving it a history: a date, an address, an architect or builder, a set of inhabitants, a style.  But also, and perhaps more fundamentally, why I personally fell in love with these buildings so immediately and so deeply. These are complicated questions for me, and I hope to try to figure them out by writing.

  

#TimisoaraArchitecture

#Iosefin

#PalatalIstvanNemes

 

.   

Timisoara Romania and PCTS Conference on Language and Communication in the Digital Era

Just got back from a jam-packed three days in Timisoara.  Mary P. Sheridan, my colleague from the University of Louisville, and I gave keynote presentations at the Professional Communication and Translation Studies Conference at the Polytechnic University in Timisoara.

The conference was great--filled with interesting papers and the kind of hospitality Romanian academic conferences are known for.

We both had fun, and people seemed really interested in Digital Humanities (Mary P) and Born Digital Scholarship (me).

AND part of it was held in a beautiful Secession building (the Lloyd Palace designed by Liphot Baumhorn) whose interior I had never seen.

At the end of the last day Mary P. and I stumbled on an Easter celebration orchestrated by City Hall that consisted of Easter Bunnies giving out candy, Mickey Mouse and balloons, a brass band playing American swing, another band play hard disco and a full array of Romanian fashion.  It was a new slant on multi-culturalism.

You can see more pictures of Mary P and me performing (for those of you who just can't get enough of this) on the PCTS Facebook page here.


*Timisoara #Romania #PCTS

Banca de Scont Timisoara 4

Tony and I lived in Timisoara, Romania for five months in 2009, while Tony had a Fulbright at The University of the West.  But I had been to Timisoara earlier.  During my first Fulbright in Sibiu, Romania in 2001, I had gone to the Timisoara BAS Conference. I didn't remember too much about Timisoara from that visit (and it was before I had a digital camera so I didn't have so many pictures).  But one building had stayed in my mind:  the Banca de Scont.

This is a building you have to look at slowly and carefully to see its beauties.  (And which you have to try to un-see what has been added on, especially the jarring business names on the lowest floor.)

Here are some of its beauties.

Its color is a warm, almost adobe, brown

Its ornamentation is turquoise

It has beautiful details like these gutter decorations

And the light fixtures

Tiles adorn the roof

Arranged at various points are small turquoise and white knots, which are modeled from Szekler embroidery

And the front facade is crowned by this beautiful tile piece

I fell in love with this building, and I spent much of my first extended Timisoara stay trying to understand its mysterious appeal.  I learned that 

• The Banca de Scont was built by Marcell Komor (1868-1944) and Dezso Jakab (1864-1932), two Budapest architects who had earlier worked with Odon Lechner.  I tried to find out more about them on-line, but there was not a lot of infomation.  I did learn that  Komor died in the Holocust.  Eventually I was able to learn more about their lives and their work.
• I also found out that they had designed other important buildings in Romania, including the Palace of Culture in Targu Mures and the Black Eagle in Oradea.  (Much more on that to come in later blog posts :)  Later I learned about their work in Subotica, Serbia (yes another blog post come on that!) And they have buildings in Budapest and Bratislava.
• I eventually found out that Banca de Scont meant Discount Bank (and felt really stupid not to have realized that earlier.)
• I discovered the meaning of some of the ornamentation.  The embroidery knots, for example, suggest a kind of authentic, almost ethnographic, Hungarian identity.  And the hive means it's a bank.  (Also more on that to come.)

I have subsequently gone on a quest to see as many of Komor and Jakab's buildings as I can.  For some reason, I feel an almost visceral connection to them.  I think part of my fascination with them are the historical ironies that surround their lives.  Many of their buildings celebrate Hungarian values and ethnicity; the Palace of Culture in Targu Mures is a particularly strong example. Yet Komor was murdered because he was Jewish, and thus not Hungarian enough.  But part of their appeal is the strength of their voice.  Unlike some Secessionist architecture that seems rather generic, Komor and Jakab's buildings look like they created them.  Their architecture is lyrical and colorful and generous in its spirit.  It is Timisoara that kindled my interest in Hungarian Secessionist architecture in general, and it is Komor and Jakab that helped me see some of that architecture as the work of real genius.

The Constructing Eye Timisoara 3

I noticed this rather nondescript building in  in one of my earliest walks in Timisoara, It looks pretty wrecked, but as I looked more carefully, I began to see what was there and what was missing.

This ornamentation of this building is symmetrical.  There are two decorated facades with a raised roof on each side of the building's entrance.  On the left hand facade, there is a face in the center.

Above the face are the organic shapes of trees.

On the right facade, the face is missing.

In viewing many of the relatively unrepaired buildings in Timisoara, I realized that I would have to use traces that remain to reconstruct imaginatively what once might have been there

Here is another seemingly nondescript building I tried to figure out.

While it is beyond sad that so many of these magnificent buildings have been left to crumble, it is nevertheless a kind of visual treasure.  The eye does not simply receive the building's aesthetic; it also constructs it. And in this construction, one sees in a different way.

What Are You Looking At? Timisoara 2

This building, with its nautical motifs, has a ship coming out of its pediment.

At some point in my early wanderings around Timisoara, I realized that many of the most interesting parts of the building were at the top--beneath the pediment or on the frieze.  At several points, people asked me "what are you looking at?"  Or I think that is what they said, as they pointed up; I don't understand Romanian.

The tops of Timisoara buildings are inhabited  by faces

This face, or some version, appears on Secession buildings all over Romania and Hungary.
Perhaps they are lares.

people

animals 

and various mythological and decorative figures

But BIG PS:  The kind of extraordinary figures and details that decorate Timisoara's buildings was soon to become a source of debate.  Hungarian architects used decoration in the quest to find a "national style."  But since the national origins of Hungarians was not completely known, architects often borrowed freely in an attempt to make the buildings look vaguely foreign or used motifs from Hungarian folklore or decorative arts.  This kind of decoration however--like Arts and Crafts Movement or Art Nouveau or German Jungendsti--became increasingly under attack.  In 1910, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos gave a lecture entitled "Ornament and Crime," in which he attacked ornament as not only unnecessary and anachronistic, but also immoral and degenerate.  It's a complicated argument that I don't really understand.  But the lush detail of Secession architecture was to be replaced by rational and clear forms of Bauhaus and other types of modernist of architecture.