Museum of Applied Arts

This guide to the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest follows architect Odon Lechner as he builds a roof of nearly a hundred fifteen thousand glazed ceramic tiles in the 1890s, drawing on Hungarian folk motifs, Zsolnay ceramics, and forms borrowed from India and Persia to invent what he hoped would be a national style. It traces the backlash that followed, from critics nicknaming the building the Gypsy Emperor's Palace to a culture minister who made sure Lechner never got another commission in the capital. You'll hear what Lechner himself later admitted about his own entrance design. Stand beneath the roof and look up, the way he meant you to.