Page 14 - Sajo ENG

city fathers had already outgrown the Town Hall by around 1920,
so much so that they wanted to have it demolished (“The bleak
and spiritless Viennese Neo-classical details bear absolutely no
Hungarian cultural value,” was the succinct and deucedly harsh
description of the building by József Borsos.) In any case, it’s
time to forget this lopsided myth. And anyone looking for a true
experience of Classicist spaces should go to Vienna, London
or St Petersburg, or at least to Balatonfüred; well, just to one
street in the latter.

I think the coming of age of our city and of our architecture
began with the large-scale, Hungarian Art Nouveau County Hall
designed by Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor; then it culminated
with József Borsos’ majolica-decorated police station and
crematorium in the Big Forest, and was enriched for years with
works that branched off Modernism: buildings by Ferenc Jost,
Tibor Vári Szabó, Gyula Rimanóczy, Tibor Hübner, Nándor Körmendi
as well as Jenő Lechner and Pál Szontágh, who designed the
Heroes’ Mausoleum, and by Jenő Padányi-Gulyás, the designer
of the Hungarian General Credit Bank in Piac Street. All this was
executed at a European scale. The taste manifest in these works
is a source of delight even today, and their existence is fortunate
in this city that has suffered so much, in fact far too much.

How can something so obvious, something that you come across
every day and shines like the sun, be so unnoticed? Here I’m not
referring to the strong accents of Gaudí or Hundertwasser, Renzo
Piano or Jean Nouvel, to their landscape-creating architectural
signs. Nor am I referring to the attractive skyscrapers in Shanghai,
designed by Sajó’s contemporary, László Hugyecz. István Sajó’s
art is discreet but it draws attention to its own sophistication
through its ingenuity and noble proportions.

Yet, the artist himself – a happy child of the millennium, a witness
to the 20th century and a citizen of Debrecen with an American
past – fell into obscurity as if he had never been here at all.
He is equally forgotten by the Jewish community and by the
Lutheran parish. Barely anything is known about him in Florida,
nor on the Adriatic coast, where he also worked extensively.
We have to realise that the administration of buildings is more
ephemeral than the edifices themselves. In most cases there is
no cadastre, no register, no architectural archival documents left.

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