From the ‘fiery bride’ to the motor block, from the bell to the smoothing-iron
Budapest’s Foundry Museum
MúzeumCafé 32.
The Foundry Museum is the pride of the casting, metallurgy and machine engineering profession, the cradle of Hungarian manufacturing industry and a unique attraction. The museum’s building is 150 years old and used to be part of the Ganz works, which closed in 1964. It preserves the iron foundry equipment of the Swiss-born master Ábrahám Ganz (1814–1867), who moved to Hungary and became famous throughout Europe with his chill-casting wheels for railway carriages. It records the life of András Mechwart (1834–1907), who began his career in this building and who contributed to the flourishing of Hungarian mechanical engineering. Its exhibitions present the history of Hungarian foundry work and the many facets of the profession. Around the building there are large-scale castings, a pantheon of significant personalities in connection with Hungarian metallurgy and casting, and a Mechwart memorial featuring a bronze statue of a foundry worker. The building, which became a listed industrial monument in 1965, opened to the public in 1969. Visitors find themselves in a huge hall of the 19th-century foundry works with its special roof structure, amidst smelting, moulding and casting equipment. The top part of a stove designed as a female figure, the ‘fiery bride’, was cast just like the most complicated parts of machinery. Thus jewellery, plumbing and gas fittings, keys and lock frames, millimetre-thin cooling flanges and engine blocks, cylinder heads and car pistons are made in the same way. Implants in human bodies, statuettes and large public monuments are also castings. A visitor is startled here, realising how many castings there are in a kitchen and how many can be found in the urban environment.