Essential Ornaments: The Architecture of Ödön Lechner & The Development of a Magyar Style: . ; Essential ornaments: the architecture of Ödön Lechner and the development of a Magyar style ; Architecture of Ödön Lechner & the development of a Magyar style

In: https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A30042

Open Access

Abstract

This thesis revises the history of nationalism in modem architecture through a study of the Budapest-based architect Odon Lechner (1845-1914) and the emergence of a Magyar architectural style. By illustrating the impetus for the Kingdom of Hungary's nationalist cultural policy at the tum of the century, the historiographic stakes of an assimilative program like "Magyarization"-the systematic undermining of non-Magyar minority populations' aesthetic, pedagogical, and political sovereignty-are aligned with Hungarian nationalist rhetoric, an imaginary in the making. Odon Lechner's designs for the Museum of Applied Arts and Geological Institute in Budapest reveal a Magyar historical narrative which allows for both regional and international ornamental appropriation. In considering the assimilative aims of Magyarization, contrary developments in design reform between Vienna and Budapest-namely a utilitarian elevation of regional ornamental regimes as opposed to their synthesis, respectively-and the emergence of a civic desire for a national visual language of form, architectural, design-based, and landscape painting projects are recast in light of the programmatic contexts they emerged from. The international or plural emerges as a meaningful and subversive tool in the formation of a Hungarian self-image and in the maintenance of Magyar cultural hegemony in the multiethnic kingdom. Through an assertion of the Austrian architectural theorist Gottfried Semper's (1803-1879) seminal manual for ornamentation, Style in the Tectonic Alts, as a methodological touchstone, vernacular as the primary source for ornament and form serves to elevate sovereign claims embedded throughout Lechner's works, claims about the Hungarian landscape which are further expanded by an exploration of artists working beyond the city upon the land itself.