Victor Határ

Leeds Town Hall

 

At the end of 1950, all the engineers and architects who were doing time in Hungarian gaols were concentrated in the notorious Kisfogház, or 'Little Prison', of the Central Prison in Budapest's Kőbánya district. There, on the first floor, they installed a secret technical bureau that was their pride and joy - not out of any misplaced 'humanity' but simply so that all that expert knowledge should not go to waste and the regime should get its cut of that, too. We drew up plans for fortifications for the Yugoslav frontier as well as standard designs for barrack blocks. In the 'drawing-office', formed by knocking three cells together,
we were able to enjoy the latitude of the carefully dosed 'freedom' of being able to traverse a whole fifteen metres; the opulence of having a drawing-board, a typewriter, tall racks of foreign journals and comfortable genuine chairs (an unheard-of luxury); two cigarettes a day (heavenly manna for a smoker); as well as our own 'liaison officer' - a reliable party-activist colleague who fetched and carried the blueprints and maintained contact with our mysterious 'Control'.
We were slick, there's no denying it. We were delighted that we did not have to pass on messages from cell to cell by the prison Morse code of tapping on the pipes, but were able to sit down next to one another and chat; delighted that we could push a T-square and slide-rule about and pass the time by devising ground plans on a pile of tracing paper (for a born architect a form of tinkering that renders him oblivious to the world around); and delighted not to feel 'ready to eat a horse', because First Floor inmates were in line for double the usual rations of a mess-tin of beans.
Except that after the first three 'inspections' the comrade liaison colleague made himself increasingly scarce; in the end, the 'visits' ceased for good.
General consternation. We held a war council. We busied ourselves with feverish sham activity - anything as long as the screws noticed nothing untoward. We designed heaps of whatever came to our minds - in my own case some four dozen family homes (we kept these in bound 'albums' which we dreamed of publishing after we were released). After that came a National Theatre Colosseum. (This was a complex incorporating an Opera House, National Theatre, Experimental Theatre, Theatre School, Institute and Museum of Theatre History, Drama Library and restaurants, below which was a two-level car park, and so on, apparently seeking to outdo Jean-Louis-Charles Garnier's glittering structure for the Paris Opéra. It was somewhat neo-Art Nouveau in appearance, almost postmodern, its planned scale far bigger than a small nation would have need of.) A full set of plans for this existed, along with all the associated ground plans, cross-sections, longitudinal sections, interior and exterior perspective views.
It was good fun, and a noble occupation; we were obviously 'keeping up our profession'. Witnessing our diligence, the screws could self-contentedly puff on their gaspers without suspecting anything.
It sometimes happened that 'work' would be set aside and I would pitch into the tall rack of professional journals from abroad. One after the other, I would pick up Domus from Switzerland, Architecture d'aujourd'hui from France, and Architecture from the UK, drinking in the illustrations and articles until lights out. It was on one such occasion that it happened. As I was taking the volumes of English Architecture down from the tall rack, I spotted on the cover of one issue a colour picture of a building complex that knocked me back on my chair and left me unable to take my eyes off it. This depicted a palatial, colonnaded building, obviously monumental. But what purpose was served by this splendid monstrosity, dazzling out from the townscape around as it did, and where could it be, who could know? Of a caption or clue, whether on the cover or inside - there was no sign. For weeks on end, that issue of the journal became my 'mandala' - an object of meditation. Of a morning, on awakening on my palliasse, that perspective apotheosis of my dream palace would be waiting there, laid out beside my seat.
Set on a one-storey basement in order to enhance its importance, the broad flight of a grand staircase swept up to a Corinthian order portico, on the seemingly endless colonnade of which the entablature was crowned by an 'attic' of baroque balustrades. Inset in the middle, over wall embellishments on a divided plinth, was a topping, a sort of square 'drum' around which ran a likewise square 'peristyle' of slender columns; and on that, set in an ornamental entablature, four large clocks, one on each of the four sides. A strange dome, soaring from that square base, was closed off by a graceful scrolled cupola. The tall, slender-looking tower could no doubt be seen from miles around.

I was instantly alive to the fact that this magic mansion was a blend of professional know-how and inventive genius: a brazen, emotion-grabbing confection in the worst possible taste, and at the same time, such a supreme expression of classicising monumentality that I was in thrall to its spell, unable to break away. There were times when that captivating stone tower would float by in my dreams: nothing could be more shamelessly kitschy yet equally an enthralling blast of a Berliozian fanfare transfixed in stone (not for nothing did Schlegel call architecture 'frozen music'). It was that kick in the pit of the stomach, the infatuation of a Vitruvius, a falling head over heals in love. Placed ready on the seat beside my palliasse, that was where my look would be cast on upon awakening. My eyes would fill with tears.
I was ashamed of being overcome by my emotions, but I vowed with tears in my eyes: one day, when all this was over and done with. Even if I had to wear my legs down to the knees and walk to the ends of the earth. But would I recognise it? - oh, and how! With an indelible image of that tower and colonnade inscribed in my memory as long as I lived. I would search until I came across it somewhere on the face of the earth. But where?
Oneiromancy is what that was. Divination by dream.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Victor Határ
born in 1914 in what he calls an "obscure little backwater in eastern Hungary", has been living in England for almost fifty years. He studied architecture (as well as musical composition) and began writing novels while working as an architect. In 1943 he was court-martialed as a member of a subversive organisation, barely escaping the death penalty. After the war he worked for UNRA, and was imprisoned again in 1950, this time for attempting to leave the country illegally. Freed in 1952, he made his living as a translator, with versions of Russian, French and German classics to his credit, not to mention Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Unable to publish, he left the country in 1957 and settled in England. He worked for the Hungarian Section of the BBC until retiring in 1976, when he started working for Radio Free Europe and for the Foreign Office, tutoring diplomats in the language and culture of Hungary. His vast oeuvre consists of novels, plays, poetry, essays and philosophical works, as well as a three-volume autobiography. This text is part of an essay devoted to Budapest's architecture but also discussing Leeds Town Hall and Cuthbert Brodrick, its architect.