Manor house of Mór Klein, Szirma

The manor-house of Sándor Klein in Szirma, whose plans Lajta worked on jointly with Ödön Lechner around 1902-1903 was the opus magnum of his ’lechnerian period’, along with the firefighters’ headquarters in Zenta. Sándor Klein, landowner, two years Lajta’s junior, might have acquired the lease of the estate in the village near Miskolc sometime around the turn of the century. He set up a dairy and kept cows and sheep, but the lexicons published between the two world wars mention the manor house as the site of a major artwork collection too. The building was destroyed in 1944.

The details of the building remind one of the Postal Savings Bank Headquarters finished in 1901 and designed by Ödön Lechner. This goes for the wavy gables, the forms of the windows as well as the edges and the ornaments of the roof. The wavy, wrought iron terrace-balustrades of the manor-house are strongly reminiscent of those above the banking hall in Lechner’s building. The parabolic arch of the entrance porch or the gambrel roof – modelled after the structures of folk architecture in North-Eastern Hungary – are however motifs alien to the lechnerian architectural syntax. The building’s picturesquely handled smaller entrance-wings in the foreground are complemented by a taller and larger wing in the background thus creating a cour d’honneur and making up a strictly symmetrical structure in both Szirma and Zenta. This small-scale monumentality is typical of Lajta and is markedly different from the less formal, asymmetric arrangements of Lechner’s smaller buildings.