Foundation for the Protection of Historical Monuments in Bihor County
Str. Iosif Vulcan 11 – Darvas-La Roche House
RO – 410041 Oradea
Romania
phone +40 771 553 065
The city of Oradea, founded on the banks of the Crișul Repede (Sebes Körös in Hungarian, Schneller Kreisch in German) river, between the Trans-Tisa Plains and the Apuseni Mountains, has fostered intense trade activities and, implicitly, a series of cultural exchanges. The city knew how to take advantage of being crossed by two important trade routes which linked Western Europe to Central and Eastern Europe (leading from Vienna through Cluj and Brașov to Bucharest and the Eastern Balkans), and the Baltic Territories to the Western Balkans (from Riga to Belgrade) respectively. This opened up a bright horizon. The city has always been pervaded by a spirit of tolerance and of cosmopolitan aspirations. This is a pivotal element of the context in which one can understand the city’s resilient attitude toward often drastic historical and cultural changes.
The cultural identity of Oradea was forged by a high number of nationalities that have lived together for centuries, bringing forth the development of cosmopolitanism. The city’s history included rich medieval and baroque episodes, while its current visual culture is dominated by those early twentieth century buildings that embodied the new aspirations of its population and delivered a high profile testimony of early modernist development patterns that earned the booming city of Oradea the sobriquet „Paris on the Peța Creek”. This bitter-sweet label coined by Hungarian poet and journalist Endre Ady at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries surfaced the basic tensions the city was trying to cope with: a rather provincial aspect of the late nineteenth century traditionalism of a lowlands oppidum, and the burgeoning, sometimes even roaring development of the early 1900s.
Buildings that give a unique charm to the city hold a rare artistic richness due to the mature examples of Modern Style. Various features of the Art Nouveau movement marked an interesting blend of proto-modernism, vernacularism, as well as Hungarian and Romanian national romanticism. They transformed a late baroque city of provincial homogeneity into a diverse and picturesque repository of Central European bourgeois ambitions.
The variety of local places of worship deserves a special mention: well-maintained, sometimes monumental churches directly hint at the extent good relations between different denominations and ethnic communities of the city: Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran, various currents of Jewish faith, as well as the New Protestant denominations, celebrating the idea of confessional freedom. However, the most impressive tokens of artistic and architectural heritage are conveyed by the Modern Style (Art Nouveau/Secession) buildings, mostly villas and specifically multi-purpose tenement houses and public service edifices built around 1900. The originality of their architectural expression is completed by a unique ornamentation translated into innovative plasterwork, ceramic decorations, and a series of functional and ornamental ironworks. A host of architects building the city graduated from different polytechnical institutes in Budapest, especially the Technical University, acquiring a resolute knowledge of classical building styles and were exposed to different interpretations of Hungarian National Romanticism. From these currents, two constituted the crucibles of the then-contemporary social imagination :
The National Style of Ödön Lechner, blending popular, oriental, and late French Renaissance elements, and the Modern Vernacularism of the student group, „The Young Ones”. The first tendency was mainly advocated here by Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor (Füchsl Palace, 1902-03), and afterwards eminently by Marcel Komor and Dezső Jakab (Adorján Tenement No. I, 1903-04 and No. II, 1904-05; Black Eagle Palace, 1908-09). The second faction was represented here by a constituent member of the student fraternity mentioned, Valér Mende (Ertler House, 1910, Róth House, 1913).
The Vágó Brothers, László and József, were adherents of the Viennese early modernist schools of architecture and applied arts, which they combined with Lechnerian inspirations. Such a complexity of the culture of form gave rise to some masterpieces of their universal ouvre, like the Villa of Imre Darvas (the Darvas-La Roche House, now seat of Oradea Heritage) and the most extensive complex housing project ever realized in the region, the former Gendarmerie School (1911-14), a spectacular composition of twelve buildings and an internationally published example of then-contemporary proto-modernist urban planning. One of the most eclectic figures of the Modern Style movement in Oradea was Budapest-born architect Frigyes Spiegel, a serious theorist of new architecture around 1900 and the designer of the first Secession-style decorative cycle on a Budapest tenement house from 1897. He was also assigned the task of designing a family house for his brother-in-law, that resulted in the first Modern Style building of Oradea (Sonnenfeld House, 1899), which combines the organic plasticity of Belgian Art Nouveau with an utter functionalism of the ground plan, and with a serious rationalism as far as the building materials were concerned. As a vanguard of modern architecture, Spiegel was not just a vocal representative of ground plan reforms, but also the first to reassess the neo-classical style at the end of the upheaval of Modern Style (Sonnenfeld Tenement and Printshop, 1912). Spiegel also stood behind the highly innovative Markovits and Mathéser tenement house (1911) that technically had no inner courtyard to secure the tenants’ unhindered acces to sunlight.
In the wake of the First World War, Art Déco influences emerged (Parc Hotel, 1927; not to mention a series of apartment houses and public edifices) that kept pace both with the traditional expressionism of the Hungarian 1920s and the International Deco-Modernism hailing from the new capital city, Bucharest (the Headquarters of the Telephone Company).
In the bold mixture characterizing Style 1900 in Oradea’s architecture, one finds an open-air sourcebook of how the vernacular, the industrial, and the natural-organic replaced the traditional artistic and architectural styles and served as the inspiration for social renewal. But the city is also an excellent venue for understanding how this relatively short period paved the way to both re-assessing the classical stylistic languages and to adopting the new vision of 1930s avant-garde modernism. Wandering the streets of Oradea, Art Nouveau could be easily grasped as the essential link in the chain of European stylistic endevours from the last hundred and fifty years.
