Fire-station, Zenta (today Senta, Serbia)
Description
This building, which he planned entirely on his own in 1903, is one of the most important works dating from Lajta’s ’lechnerian period’. The home of the small town’s fire brigade was completed by June 1904 and had cost 50 thousand crowns. The two smaller pavilions aligned with the street housed the officers’ rooms and the firemen’s association’s offices, while the main building further back in the courtyard was home to the equipment, the stables, the firemen’s dormitory and the main office. The building’s picturesquely handled smaller entrance-pavilions in the foreground are complemented by the taller and larger building in the background thus creating a cour d’honneur and making up a strictly symmetrical structure, just like in Szirma, at the Klein manor house. This small-scale monumentality is typical of Lajta and is markedly different from the less formal, asymmetric arrangements of Lechner’s smaller buildings. This is one of the best preserved works of Béla Lajta.
