Architectural Renaissance: Merging Classic and Contemporary Design

What is the Vienna Secession, and how did it reach Budapest?

The Vienna Secession was an art movement founded in 1897 by artists and architects who broke away from the academic styles of the time. In architecture it meant façades covered in ornament taken from nature and myth: ribbons, wreaths, masks, female figures and flowers. Its best-known building is the Secession exhibition hall by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Otto Wagner was among its leading architects.

The movement soon crossed the border. Budapest around 1900 was booming and open to every new style, and Hungarian architects mixed the Viennese influence with their own ideas into what Hungarians call szecesszió. Two of them, Gyula Ullmann and Géza Aladár Kármán, who ran an office together, followed Vienna most closely and built it into the city's apartment buildings.

A walk around Szabadság tér

The idea for the Amery Residence came on a walk around Szabadság tér, Liberty Square, in Budapest. Two buildings on the streets beside the square stopped me, and only later did I find out that both were by Kármán and Ullmann, built when the Viennese Secession had only just reached Hungary.

Szabadság tér, Budapest. Photo: Both Balázs, pestbuda.hu.

The Wertheimer and Frankl House at Hold utca 6, a mixed-use building from 1900, caught my eye with its metalwork: steel pillars dividing the ground and first floors, steel consoles carrying the balconies, a metal canopy, and wrought-iron railings that look like lake seaweed.

The Ullmann House at Szabadság tér 11, finished in 1901 as the architect's own investment, is the opposite: calm and symmetrical, with a closed balcony at the centre of its five-bay façade and attic gables that rise slightly above the roofline.

What I kept from 1900, and what I changed

I kept the language and changed the plan. The façade speaks Secession, but the building inside works the way people live today.

	Taken from the originals	Changed for today
Façade	Symmetry and a strong centre, from the Ullmann House	White plaster with gilded stucco, and teal ceramic tiles in the loggias
Structure	Steel pillars, consoles and metal framework, from the Wertheimer and Frankl House	Steel pergolas on a green roof, with ivy climbing the sides
Windows	The rhythm of the façade	Floor-to-ceiling windows instead of small ones, for far more daylight
Circulation		Two staircases instead of the open courtyard corridors of 1900s buildings
Use	Mixed use, like Hold utca 6	A café, a restaurant and an art gallery along the entrance corridor, 20 homes above
Homes		Larger apartments on the first floor, with balconies on the courtyard side
Below ground		A garage, storage rooms for residents and a bike room

The façade did not come out right the first time. Some decorations worked on paper and not in the render: once I saw the building in a realistic street scene, I changed the ornament and parts of the façade, sometimes more than once. That is exactly what 3D visualisation is for. It's much cheaper to change a façade in a render than on scaffolding.

I set the final images on an overcast day and at dusk, for a moody, soft light with the windows starting to glow.

Is classical architecture coming back?

Slowly, yes. After modernism pushed it aside in the mid-20th century, classical elements returned in the postmodern buildings of the 1980s and 1990s, and today there is a whole contemporary classical movement, with its own schools and prizes, that builds new buildings in traditional styles, Art Nouveau included.

The video below is a good introduction to how and why it is happening:

Berlin is already doing it

Berlin, heavily damaged in the Second World War, is the clearest example. The Hotel Adlon, rebuilt in 1997 by Patzschke Architekten to replace the original destroyed in 1945, was controversial at first; since then the approach has been repeated across the city. Eisenzahnstraße 1 by Sebastian Treese Architekten, finished in 2016, is a new apartment building inspired by 19th-century Paris: a curved façade, full-height windows, fine cornices and 12 generous apartments around a garden courtyard.

Eisenzahnstraße 1, Berlin. Visualization: Sebastian Treese Architekten.

Vienna, Budapest and Prague have even more reason to follow. Their identity is their 1900s architecture, and every new grey box chips away at it. I'd love to see developers there build new houses that people will still photograph in a hundred years.

That is the thread running through my work: restoring Alkotmány 27 in 3D, the Jade Apartment inside this building, and the website that presents it.

Are you a developer planning a building with more character than the street around it? I can show it in photorealistic 3D before it's built, and help you get the façade right on screen instead of on scaffolding. Tell me about your project, or see the 3D exterior page.