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Lajta [Leitersdorfer], Béla
(b Budapest, 23 Jan 1873; d Vienna, 12 Oct 1920). Hungarian architect. He graduated in 1896 from the Budapest Imperial Joseph College, where he had been taught by the two great masters of historicism Alajos Hauszmann and Imre Steindl. He worked in Berlin under Alfred Messel (1897–8) and in London with R. Norman Shaw (1898–9), and he studied medieval and early Renaissance architecture intensively. On returning to Hungary at the turn of the century he became a colleague of Ödön Lechner, the protagonist of a Hungarian national style, and travelled to Transylvania and other parts of Hungary studying folk architecture and the decorative arts. The L-shaped, three-storey Institute for the Blind on Amerikai Street in Budapest (1905–7) was his first significant independent work. The fine balance between symmetry and asymmetry produce an effect reminiscent of the work of Philip Webb and Shaw, while such details as the high stone plinth and the stone framing of the entrance acknowledge the influence of Finnish Romanticism. Lajta was interested in the art of the cemetery and designed a number of sepulchre monuments and the mortuary for the Salgótarján Street Jewish Cemetery (1908) in Budapest. His City Trade School on Vas Street, Budapest (1910–12), was influenced by Messel’s second Wertheim Department Store in Berlin (1896–7; see GERMANY, fig. 11) in its façade and arrangement of masses. The entrance is characterized by stone panels modelled after folk carvings. His apartment block on the corner of Népszinház Street, Budapest (1911), is without ornament, but its swinging arrangement of forms surpasses any objective–expressive aspirations he may have had in the 1890s. Lajta provided a pioneering solution to the problems posed by the façade of a mixed-use business–residential block with his Rózsavölgyi Building (1911–12) at 5 Szervita Square, Budapest. Ceramic covers the first three storeys, contrasting with the huge glass façade. The upper four storeys are covered with glazed white brick and have uniform window divisions. Ornamentation on the parapet edges and on the uppermost, cantilevered balcony is reduced to narrow, horizontal ceramic ribbons.
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