Lajta, Béla (1873 - 1920)

Architect. Béla Lajta was born in Óbuda, the son of a master tailor. He gained a certificate from the Budapest Technical University in academic year 1895/1896 and was subsequently awarded scholarships to study in Italy, Germany, England, France, Morocco, Spain and Russia. In England, he met Baillie Scott (1865–1945), one of the outstanding architects of the time. He was acquainted with Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and Adolf Loos (1870–1933), masters of the Vienna “New Art”. Upon coming home in 1900, he opened his own practice, but also travelled all over the country and collected items of ethnographic interest. His early work, such as the furnishings for the Bárd Music Shop and several gravestones, make use of the motifs of Ödön Lechner, with whom he worked on several designs in 1902 and 1903. Lajta, however, broke with Hungarian-style Art Nouveau. The villa he designed for Dezső Malonyai (1905) was influenced by English architecture and Hungarian folk motifs, and the Institute for the Blind, built between 1906 and 1908, continued this line. His furnishings for the latter clearly bear the influence of ethnographical collections – the shapes and structures of vernacular furniture. For the Parisiana Music Hall, he designed an oriental facade and almost ascetic interiors, but with luxury-quality materials, evoking the work of Wiener Werkstätte architects and presaging Art Deco. The Vas Street Commercial School, built between 1909 and 1912, marked a new stage in Lajta’s career with uncomplicated forms: square furnishings and distinctively Hungarian decorative motifs that are a blend of modernism and late Art Nouveau. A contribution to these designs came from Lajos Kozma, who was working in his office at the time. He also had a part in designing the Budapest City Library and the National Theatre, but the events of the First World War took their toll on his health. He died in 1920. Lajta’s oeuvre embraces the range of the turn-of-the-century style movements, starting from his own version of Lechnerian, national-Hungarian Art Nouveau and developing into a unique style that bore the marks of international currents, particularly German, Austrian and Finnish influences. All this resulted in some definitive Hungarian architectural works of the late Art Nouveau and paved the way for the Art Deco and modernist architecture of the interwar period.