EVERYONE should have a favourite building.
It should be a structure they never get sick of looking at, a building with attractive architectural features or a colourful history laced with endless tales about the activities of lively residents.
For the past 14 years my favourite block of bricks was the Eden Building in Saigon’s busy District One, the colonial-era masterpiece that occupied the land between Nguyen Hue, Le Loi and Dong Khoi streets for the past dozen or so decades.
Not only did I love the building for the way it looked – it was Art Deco all the way with the illusion of pillars, strong horizontal lines, panel windows, curved corners, ornamental oversized portholes high in facade – but it’s a place that played an important role in 20th century Saigon.
It was built by the French during the 1930s, it was home to a number of the wire services during the American War with NBC and AP both occupying rooms in corner opposite the Rex Hotel, and the ground-floor mall was the place the fashionable American wives of military men and diplomats shopped during the late 60s and early 70s.
But since my last visit to Vietnam, when I discovered the Eden Building had been demolished as the nouveau riche Vietnamese race towards modernity, I have been on the hunt for a new favourite building.
There are lots of contenders –every Belle Époque block in Paris’ 7th Arrondissement, the Art Nouveau structures in Riga’s Elizabetes Iela, the Nicholas Building in Melbourne’s CBD – but I might have found a winner in Budapest.
The Anker Building, which occupies one of the busiest corners in the heart of the Hungarian capital opposite Elizabeth Park, is a regal structure that has seen better days but is still an imposing and elegant structure.
This place is actually two blocks, with the main building designed as a triangle fronting three streets and built around a central courtyard and a second structure that follows that curve of the narrow lane Anker Koz.
I don’t know much about the Anker building, certainly not as much as I know about the Eden Building, but I do know it was assembled in the final years of the 19th century.
A website that seems to be advertising renovated apartments on the 4th floor of the Anker Building, or Anker Palace as it's described by the folks at Prime Location Properties, gave me only a sentence of information about the place.
"The romantic style is well reflected in the towers and bastion-looking architecture while the antique features of huge marble columns with the triangle on their top give the building the name ‘palace’,’’ the internet site says.
For a place that’s more than 100 years old the Anker Building isn’t looking too bad, especially when you consider it endured half a century of neglect when the country sat behind the Iron Curtain and dozens of families would have been packed into every room.
The external surfaces are painted a golden shade that looks something like the royal hue covering Vienna’s Schonbrunner Palace, and where the plaster hasn’t fallen away there are ornamental flowers and patters surrounding the windows and covering the faux panels that define the style of the day.
There are a few balconies facing the streets, and those landings are protected by wrought-iron balustrades that are simple but elegant with a bold crossed pattern, and the three towers that crown the front of the main building are topped with tarnished silver covers.
My words don’t do this building justice, so here are a collection of photos that I took today as the afternoon sun kissed the golden facade.
