The atmosphere and judgment of a building are fundamentally influenced by the function and use, in addition to the design intent and constructor attitude. Even today, such changes can occur when a rusting industrial estate is transformed into a cultural centre, or a decommissioned military object into an adventure park. Needless to say, how different is the experience of the same edifice when the presence of a sullen armed guard warns against approaching or on the contrary: the joyful uproar of children fills the environment.
Most of the buildings storing the collections of the Herman Ottó Museum have modified function. They were originally designed and erected for different purposes. It may seem surprising, but all this applies to the institution’s main building (28 Görgey Artúr Str., Miskolc H-3529), the columns of which overlook to the People’s Garden (Népkert). Looking at its façade, first, without background information, the tarnished public collections in Budapest (such as the tympanums and colonnades of the Hungarian National Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Museum) can be thought as a parallel or the Parthenon of the Acropolis of Athens as an ancient antecedent, and one might think that the building, erected on the eastern foot of Avas hill, was designed for cultural purposes from the outset.
The main building of the museum has a deceptive image, because it is younger than its style shows: the elements imitating antiquity and the classicizing reform era were designed by the architect Pál Vincze. Its groundwork started in the middle of the 19th century and it was inaugurated on 20 September, 1952. For what purpose? This may be the next, hardly pleasant surprise: the building at 28 Görgey Str. was erected as the base of the local body of the communist dictatorship, the county party committee (1948-1956: Hungarian Workers’ Party / MDP, from 1956 the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party / MSZMP).
The headquarters of the county party committee, today’s museum is a socialist realist, commonly speaking socrealist, style building. What do we mean by that? The politicized atmosphere of the actual socialism naturally affected the architecture, but between 1951 and 1956 the pressure of the party-state ideology caused a truly drastic deviation in the autonomous development of the profession. The architectural pursuit of the Soviet socialist realism emerged as an increasingly aggressively articulated demand from the leading coryphaei of the MDP.
In the absence of social legitimacy, the communist dictatorship, longing for a kind of revolutionary and national tradition, tried to appropriate the spirituality of 1848, and in connection with this forced the motives of the reform era’s classicist system in architecture. Thus, architects deprived of the possibility of private practice, therefore working in state-owned companies and almost exclusively satisfying state orders, had to decorate the facades with tympanums, attics, antique columns in order for their work to meet ideological expectations.
The building provided office spaces for the Union of Working Youth (DISZ), and there were a restaurant and kitchen functioning in the basement. The building fulfilled its original function for less than three decades, by 1979 the new party headquarters of the MSZMP was built opposite the Mindszent church and the MÁV board, and in 1980, the museum could move to 28 Görgey street. The change of function was, of course, accompanied by significant internal alterations, but the façade remained strikingly socreal, however there was one significant change: the five-pointed communist star on the tympanum was replaced by the inscription “MUSEUM”.
Krisztián Kapusi