"Újszínház", the former Parisiana Club, 35 Paulay Ede street

Source: egykor.hu

During the long history of Béla Lajta’s unique building, which preceded the Art Deco style, there were a lot of transformations, and after the latest one, the house emerged in its original beauty like a butterfly from its cocoon. The theatre has opened on 13^th February 1909, 114 years ago, as the Parisiana Club.

Béla Lajta, the architect of the club
Source: pestbuda.hu

The club on “Két szerecsen” (currently Paulay Ede) street had its own history. Originally – but not that surprisingly – there was a club called Parisiana in Paris, established in 1894 on Poissonnière Boulevard, designed by Édouard Jandelle-Ramier architect. This was a so-called “café-concert”, which was French for a place, where the audience was entertained with music, dancing while they had meals and drinks. The period between the Compromise and World War I was filled with recovery, economical prosperity, and the sense of “joyous peace” in Hungary, and it was no different in France (not even in Europe) between the Prussian-French war in 1870-71 and 1914. To them, this period was the „Belle Époque” (Beautiful Era), which, as a relatively long peaceful time, gave space for a steady, calm growth, especially for the upper- and middle-classes. The popular venues of this era were the music halls, cabarets and variety theaters.

 
The interior of the club - then
Source: MESZL Budapest Collection, egykor.hu

Naturally, Budapest, just beginning its prosperity, needed a similar Parisiana, which later came to life on the grounds of Ancient Buda Castle, part of the Millennium Exhibition. This area was an entertainment district, which was established in the City Park next to the National Millennium Exhibition. However, history had its own place here: On the north edge of the Animal Park, as per the plans of Oskar Marmorek, a group of buildings was constructed as a replica of Buda Castle during the Turkish Invasion, made of wood, plaster and other light-structure solutions. The builders took the historical accuracy very seriously: they used the plans drawn in 1686, when Buda Castle was reclaimed – made by an Italian engineering soldier, Captain Marsigli – as basis for the replica, and studied maps and drawings of that time, as well.

 
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu), octogon.hu

On the farther edge from the entrance to Ancient Buda Castle, there was a mosque with a minaret, Turkish well and a bazaar. The Parisiana Club – where among others there were a company of Parisian mime artists, tableaus and female dancers as entertainment – stood opposite the mosque. Ancient Buda Castle, however, didn’t stay open for long.

The owner, or according to some sources: leaseholder, of the Parisiana, Adolf Friedmann moved his club to the “Két szerecsen”, currently Paulay Ede street. In February 1907, his wife, Amália Schwartz applied for a building permit, the plans for it drawn up by Béla Lajta. The long, narrow lot was completely built in. This was the first place where the audience was able to dance until morning on the dance floor, which wasn’t the custom until then. Its auditorium had three parts: a large, stone and wood-paneled hall with tables and chairs on the ground floor, an upstairs conservatory and a narrow gallery.

   
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu)

On the street side, there was an entrance hall opening into a smaller lobby with cloakroom. Above these Lajta created a small hall, which could be accessed on a separate staircase from the street. This worked as a cabaret stage, then later as a bar then puppet theater. A different staircase starting from the lobby lead up to the first-floor boxes.

The great hall, thanks to the shape of the lot, has been built long and narrow, originally filled with tables and chairs. The walls were covered with marble, and they were closed up by a gold-plated ledge, which was tiered Eastern-style, tall and protruding significantly. The ceiling was simple, only decorated with modest chandeliers, which were surrounded by gypsum ornaments. The stage opening was also simple, its ledge held up by kneeling caryatids.

The street-side façade was designed by Lajta with square proportions on a flat surface, on the outside the building looks like a solid, homogeneous stone cube. This new design he used was discussed by many architecture and art historians. There are traces of a certain Romantic architecture style, which had appeared during the French Revolution and builds upon the geometry of basic shapes, as well as the continuation of the new architectural designs by Ödön Lechner. The Ancient Eastern style is definitely present on the building, but behind the battlements, the designs of battlement Renaissance of the Highlands can be found. According to the original plans, there was supposed to be more ornamentation on the façade: in the space above the entrance gates there was a sculpture planned, and on the first floor two palm trees would’ve framed a sun disc.

  
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu), octogon.hu

The ten angels, made by Géza Maróti, on the battlement had been the subject of many debates among people. Similar figures popped up again in 1916, when Lajta designed the sets for the Opera House for the opera The Queen of Sheba by Károly Goldmark. From this, some assumed that the battlement angels are cherubs from the Bible, who guard the Garden of Eden or stand by the gates of the Temple of Solomon. Others, however, think that Lajta wouldn’t put biblical figures on the façade of a club, so they would be simple ornamentation motifs with an aesthetical function of creating contrast against the solidity and smoothness of the stone façade, to turn the horizontal closing ledge in to vertical and giving a busy contour to the attic.

 
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu)

By the same thinking, the monkeys above the gates could be the symbols of an Egyptian god, or the metaphor of some mental state, or they could simply be decorations to the turn-of-the-century fad of African-American music and dancing, making the orbs by their feet not some mystical artifacts, but coconuts. The latter interpretation seems to be proven by the fact that the palm tree trunks behind the monkeys were supposed to reach past the gates and into the building, their tops continuing on the glasses of the upstairs triple-windows, which show coconuts.

Everyone agrees, though, that Lajta managed to precede the Art Deco style, which had only become popular in 1925 during the Paris Applied Arts World Exhibition. This makes the Parisiana the first Art Deco building of Europe, and maybe even the world.

The building did not stay in its original glory for long. In 1910, it was renamed as “Királypalota” then in 1912 as Palais de Danse, Dance Palace, which brought a change in its interior, too. The new design was made by Miklós Menyhért artist, two new frescoes appeared on the walls called “Bachanalia” and “Dance” by Dezső Köbler and Manó Vesztrócy. In the lobby there was a marble fountain and fireplace and a rather bizarre “American bar”. These changes garnered pretty mixed reception: the paper “Ország-Világ” featured a flattering article, while Artúr Bárdos called them a failure.

 
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu)

After the “joyous peace” the music halls were pushed to the background, giving an opportunity for theaters to achieve success. This era overlapped with an architectural decline, and these two factors lead to the reconstruction of many music halls into theaters. This happened to the Dance Palace in 1919. The auditorium was changed, the tables and chairs were replaced by bolted down rows of theater chairs and the new theater became the Revue Theater for a few years before going bankrupt.

In 1921, the building was bought by Unio Theater Operation and Architecture Ltd. and started another reconstruction, with the plans of László Vágó. This time they included the façade, as well: they installed a wrought-iron framed glass canopy with four lamps hanging off of it. A new side entrance was created on the left side. The four-month-long project resulted in the opening of Blaha Lujza Theater in October 1921. This didn’t have a long future, either, though, and ended in bankruptcy. The state took over the managing of the building and it went on as a smaller branch of the National Theater until 1932. After that until World War II, various companies rented the place, but this was a fruitless endeavor, as well, and further productions were halted.

  
Source: Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu), octogon.hu

After the war, the theater opened again under Zoltán Várkonyi as Art Theater, as a private theater. The nationalization brought changes once more, and between 1949 and 1952 the building became “Úttörő” Theater, then a small branch of the Nagymező street Youth Theater. Then it became Jókai Theater, bringing many brutal design changes to the building. The marble covering of the façade was taken off to create space for windows. The new façade was then plastered and painted yellow, the window-frames green. The aluminum plating on the three original entrance doors was pulled off and they were painted to dark brown. Tin letters lit up with neon tubes to showcase the name of the theater on the façade, surrounded by a frieze of red and white ceramic tiles. The façade on the ground floor was pulled back a bit, the upstairs floor was held up by a reinforced concrete beam on four reinforced concrete semi-columns.

The facade of the Jókai theater - 1950s
Source: octogon.hu

By 1962, the façade was really worn down, there was no way to escape a larger renovation, which, however, was done with the less finer method of the time: they got rid of the angel attic, and covered the whole façade from the ground up with a curtain wall, which was divided the same way as an office building back then. Only the canopy above the entrance gave the building some elegance, and coloring the glass panes on the curtain wall was to bring some playfulness, as well  - their backs were painted blue and yellow, since no one manufactured colored glass panes. This was the first curtain wall in Budapest, so it was a pretty new structure, but because of the poor execution it quickly fell into disrepair. During this renovation the still remaining original ornaments of the façade had also disappeared.

By 1975, the building had gotten into such a condition that there was a need for another renovation. The static examination showed that the most economical solution would be the construction of a new theater. Nothing came of this, though, no demolition, no renovation, the plays were still shown in the children’s theater.

The facade of the Bartók Theater - 1960s and '70s
Source: octogon.hu

In 1987, the renovation had to happen, and then – not known why and how, maybe because of the atmosphere leading up to the Regime Change or the growing interest for the turn of the century – the presiding City Council decided to urgently reconstruct the original façade from Lajta’s designs. By this time nothing remained of that, except for a few marble tiles on the façade (and those were in the flooring of the entrance hall) and a copper piece, the size of a hand, of the frieze. The reconstruction was done as per the plans of Tamás Kőnig and Péter Wagner, the research of the building’s architectural history was done by Ferenc Dávid. Some of the plans of this reconstruction – engineering plans, expert opinions about soil mechanics – are in the archives of Lechner Knowledge Center.

Considering the interior, though, redoing the designs by Lajta was not practical. So in the theater the goal was the state designed by László Vágó, which could be reconstructed to the exact details, and was a significant memory of the 1920s. The audience rooms (entrance hall, cloakroom, cafeteria, etc.) gradually lost their original style through the years, here the architects used older motifs (a ziggurat for example) to harmonize the remaining and redone elements with the newer ones.

  
The facade of Újszínház - nowadays
Source: Bagyinszki Zoltán Bagyinszki (bagyinszki.eu), octogon.hu

The street-side façade could not be reconstructed completely to its original state, since during the renovation in the 1950s a reinforced concrete beam was put in on the ground floor, which held up the reinforced concrete columns with arched cross section, and another beam on top of them. These elements remained for static purposes, so they had to be taken into consideration during the planning phase. This resulted in the façade elements not put back into their original spots and the proportions are also slightly different from Lajta’s designs.

This reconstruction was finished in 1990, the theater then got named after János Arany writer. In the following year the Hungarian Museum of Architecture of the National Inspectorate of Monuments (OMF) created an exhibition called ”Parisiana újjáépítése – Tisztelgés Lajta Béla emlékének” (The Reconstruction of Parisiana – Salute to the memory of Béla Lajta – ed.), showing the history and renovation of the building. In 1994, the Újszínház theater started in place of the youth theater, using a new concept and a new acting company.

Source: pestbuda.hu

Sources: octogon.hu, egykor.hu