A palace for exhibitions at the edge of the City Park
Albert Schickedanz and the Museum of Fine Arts
MúzeumCafé 14.
The Museum of Fine Arts was built a century ago. What can we learn about the history of the museum’s construction between 1900 and 1906? “Who is Schickedanz? What is Schickedanz?” The questions are authentic today, since neither the name of the architect nor his oeuvre are particularly well known. Albert Schickedanz was born in Galicia to an ethnic German family involved in trade. In the mid-1860s he studied architecture at the Polytechnische Schule in Karlsruhe, but he had to curtail his studies due to his family’s financial problems. After spending some years in the studio of the Viennese architect Tietz, he moved to Pest. He had spent his childhood in Hungary, thus he found a familiar setting in Budapest, a prospering city with a growing number of constructions. After gaining experience in the office of Miklós Ybl, one of the most successful architects of the 19th century, he worked with several engineers in Pest. Lacking academic qualifications, he learnt the basics of architecture on the job, though his work shows a thorough knowledge of antique, medieval and Renaissance architectural styles and their inspiration. Throughout their joint work spanning decades, Ybl acknowledged the talent of Schickedanz, who developed a significant oeuvre of his own. He designed the plinths for the Deák memorial and the statues of János Arany and the Arad martyrs; made designs for the windows of the National Museum; won the tender for the Batthyány Mausoleum; planned a bridge for the flood-stricken town of Szeged; designed several public buildings, mansions and villas in Pest; made plans for the decoration of the ceiling frescos of the ceremonial hall of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and his furniture and applied art designs imitating the medieval style have also remained. His largest plan, one of the defining views of the capital, is represented by the colonnade of the Millenary Monument in Heroes’ Square with the Museum of Fine Arts and the Kunsthalle. For Schickedanz preparing a competitive architectural design for the Museum of Fine Arts was not a new task. Between 1873 and 1877 he and Károly Pulszky made interior designs for the Museum of Applied Arts. As a result of their cooperation the first draft plans for the Fine Arts Museum could have been made in 1894. Pulszky was appointed director of the National Picture Gallery and prime minister Sándor Wekerle commissioned Schickedanz to prepare further plans for the museum. Those plans were not made for a specific location. They were rather regarded as outlines preparing the project, establishing the requirements, exploring the potential problems and suggesting various solutions for those. The first designs, uninfluenced in terms of space and size, were dominated by the forms and spatial structural principles of Italian quattrocento architecture. Schickedanz would have arranged the works of art in a palazzo. Yet, probably to Pulszky’s influence, he soon abandoned that idea. The next plan showed the later implemented structure grouped around large grandiose courts, and the block-like groundplan was replaced by an elongated shape. This version was better adjusted to the requirement of the museum with its mixed collection, and fused the gallery-like line of halls, ensuring advantageous lighting for them and their related spaces, with large interior heights organised around courts established for sculptural display. Schickedanz entered the tender for the architectural design of the Fine Arts Museum, announced in 1898, together with his business partner Fülöp Herzog, and he modified his earlier plan in such a way that he was no longer thinking of a homogeneous block but a frontal elevation with pillars and a tympanum, behind which was a two-storey enclosed block accommodating the main gallery and wings which echoed antique temples. During construction Schickedanz behaved in his usual scrupulous and meticulous manner. He managed to have the work done at the lowest possible cost and was able to spend the saved sums on materials which were of better quality than quoted in the original estimates. Thus the picture halls had durable and elegant marble door frames, while the columns and the main stairs of the Ionic and Doric halls were made of compact limestone. However, there was not enough money to erect the statue decoration on the exterior façades or to paint the gallery walls in Pompeian style. Nevertheless, the building incorporaed the latest heating and cooling technology and its engineering equipment was also modern. Storerooms for the collections were not included in the plans, but that was not a requirement at the time. The museum was designed for a far smaller number of visitors than today, as witnessed by the fact that it was open only in the morning on certain days.