YOLO Journal Issue 12 - Flipbook - Page 37
BUDAPEST’S
BATH HOUSES
Photographs and Words by Chris Wallace
Budapest, Hungary, has to be one
of the most exciting architectural cities
in the world. In part because it is so
resistant to renovation, reinvention. The
Belle Époque really was an expansive
time for the city, when the piles of
treasure that had been paid in taxes to
the Austrian Empire were (after the 1867
Austro-Hungarian compromise) freed up
to be spent at home. The eclectic styles
of the buildings that rocketed up with
this cash—incorporating Neoclassical,
Gothic and Renaissance references,
often in a single structure, and from one
floor to the next—contain incredible
optimism and local pride, and created a
singular fantasia of the cityscape. That
pride and public spirit meant that many
of these grand oddities were built as
cathedrals of performance, conversation,
and recreation: theaters, coffee houses
and, taking advantage of the geothermal
activity, public baths. They became great
palaces for communal reverie: in stimulation, comfort, inspiration and relaxation.
For my money, there is nothing
more romantic, more beautiful, than a
grand old building, an ecstatic aesthetic
statement, allowed to weather, to crumble a bit, and patina just so. The great
Gellért hotel and baths, built in 1918 on
a spring that had been a bath site since
at least Ottoman times in the 1200s, is
my favorite iteration of this. From the
swoopy Art Nouveau barrel-vaulting
of the spaces to the fairytale tableaux
in the baths made with the famous
Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain, to the
cozy, wood-paneled locker rooms, every
vignette in the place feels like a Wes
Anderson set. And the cinematic analogy
is hard to escape, all down the Danube,
on the traditionally tonier and more
mountainous Buda side, where these
springs have been harnessed for public
baths going back hundreds, and even
thousands of years—and have, uniformly,
been left to become period pieces.
Across the river, in the city park, the
sprawling Széchenyi thermal baths may •
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