Postal Savings Bank: Lechner's Roof for the Birds
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head right back and follow the facade up to the roofline. Waves of glazed tiles in green and gold, a gable that ripples like embroidered cloth, and near the top, ceramic bees climbing towards their hives.
Key Facts
| Place | Postal Savings Bank: Lechner's Roof for the Birds |
|---|---|
| Address | Hold utca 4, 1054 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.50430, 19.05230 |
| Part of Walk | Crown, Dome and River: Budapest's Parliament, St Stephen's Basilica & the Danube Bank |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head right back and follow the facade up to the roofline. Waves of glazed tiles in green and gold, a gable that ripples like embroidered cloth, and near the top, ceramic bees climbing towards their hives. On a street of grey bankers' stone, this building looks like it put on its festival clothes and never took them off.
It was built between 1899 and 1901 for the Royal Hungarian Postal Savings Bank, and its architect was Ödön Lechner. Lechner wanted something no one else had: a Hungarian national style, not borrowed from Vienna or Paris. He looked for it in folk embroidery, carved peasant furniture and the ornament of Hungary's eastern origins, as he imagined them. The bees are a joke with a moral, because a savings bank is a hive where small amounts become something big.
The tiles came from the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, which had developed a frost-resistant ceramic called pyrogranite. That meant colour could survive Budapest winters on the outside of a building. Lechner used it everywhere: on the Museum of Applied Arts, on town halls in the provinces, and here, where the colour is densest at the very top, where hardly anyone looks.
The story goes that someone asked him why he spent so much money on a roof nobody could see from the street. Lechner answered that the birds would see it. Whether he really said it or not, Budapest has repeated it for over a century, and it fits the building perfectly.
People sometimes call Lechner the Hungarian Gaudí, and the two were working in the same years without imitating each other. Today the building belongs to the Hungarian State Treasury, so it is still, in a way, a bank. Now turn back towards Szabadság tér and walk into its northern half, where an obelisk and an embassy stare at each other across the grass.