Sandor Schmidl Mausoleum (Jewish Cemetery, Budapest)

Born Béla Leitersdorfer in Budapest-Óbuda to a middle-class family, Béla Latja graduated from the architecture faculty of Budapest Technical University in 1895. He worked for Alfred Messel in Berlin and Ödön Lechner in Budapest while studying historical architecture throughout Western Europe and North Africa. After completing the floridly “Hungarian Secession”–style Schmidl Mausoleum (1904, with Lechner), Latja worked on other Hungarian Secession projects in Budapest, such as the Education Institute for the Blind (1905–1908). These are recognized as precursors to the international progressivist style of the A Fiatalok (The Young Ones) movement, which strove for a uniquely Hungarian style in the arts and architecture by fusing vernacular Finnish, Hungarian, Transylvanian, Egyptian, and other regional motifs.

Born Eugen Jenö Károly in Pest, Hungary, Ödön Lechner had early access to the building trade because his grandparents were brick manufacturers. Completing his architecture degree at the Berlin Bauakadamie, Lechner returned in 1878 to Budapest, where he designed buildings in a style that combined classicist and Hungarian folk-art sensibilities, including Budapest’s Drechsler Palace (1884), the Geological Institute Building (1899), and the Hungarian State Treasury (1901). Lechner is best known for his Jugendstil buildings with steel structural supports and Zsolnay terra-cotta that broke free from Gothic, Renaissance, and classicist styles, making his Museum of Applied Arts (1896) an internationally acclaimed building. His expansive portfolio of art-nouveau buildings has earned him the title of the “Hungarian Gaudi.”