Postal Savings Bank

This guide to the Postal Savings Bank in Budapest follows the architect Ödön Lechner, who spent the 1890s fighting to invent a Hungarian style free of Vienna's classical rules. You'll hear how a rigged first competition for the bank's 1899 headquarters was overturned, handing the job to Lechner and his partner Sándor Baumgarten, who raised the whole building in about a year on the site of an old fortress and execution yard. It traces the roofline's gold and green ceramic bees, hives and serpents from the Zsolnay works in Pécs, and the strange bet Lechner made about who would ever look up to see them.