Page 35 - Sajo ENG

1928–1931

APARTMENT COMPLEX OF THE

ISRAELITE COMMUNITY

6 Hatvan Street, Debrecen

The Israelite community of Debrecen originally planned to have a secondary
school built on the plot in Hatvan Street, but instead they had the two-storey
house on it demolished and a modern but elegant, palace-like five-storey
apartment complex designed. The construction costs of the luxury complex built
in the American and North German brick-expressionist style were covered by a
25-year US dollar loan obtained from the Hungarian Savings Bank of Pest. The
architect was István Sajó, the son of the new vice-president of the community.

Sajó envisioned a building that would satisfy all the needs of its residents
through the use of modern technology. He, therefore, included a lift, central
heating and running hot water in the T-plan building, and fitted the apartments
in the cheaper, courtyard wing with good ventilation to facilitate healthy living
conditions.

He designed apartments with large floor spaces behind the trapezoidal, two-
and three-storey-high bay windows ending in open balconies at the top of the
street-front brick façade. He articulated the façade by triangular plaster cornices
and horizontally-striped bands with a geometric design. He used bricks made by
the Debrecen clinker brick factory both as structural and decorative moulding
elements and inserted the ‘prickly’-shaped, coloured artificial stone elements
of Abstract Expressionism, borrowed from the North German brick architecture
of the time, into the parapet bands between the bay windows. He applied a
3x6 grid on the first-floor windows, which, together with the 3x4 and 3x5 grids,
were adopted from Amsterdam architecture, mediated to Hungary by Viennese
architects.

The upwardly tapering, triangular tip of the skylight above the entrance has a
broken, prism-like structure in the German Expressionist style, resembling the
solution applied on the entrance of the Meßberghof in Hamburg. Sajó placed
an iron armature on each side of the gate. He repeated the exterior plaster
decoration of the façade in the interiors too, varying the zigzag motif in the
entrance hall and the corridors as well as on the wrought iron lift doors.
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