Franczia étterem: the French Restaurant by Karman & Ullmann as a Viennese Gartengebäude in the Hungarian Millennium Exposition of 1896

The text focus on the french restaurant designed by the architects Karman & Ullmann for the Hungarian Millennial celebration held in Budapest in 1896, investigating how the not national aspects of this pavilion fitted with the strongly national aspects of the whole exhibition and analyzing the topic of this kind of pavilions within the framework of the European exhibitions of the turn of the century. The two architects, later prominent designers of the houses of the jewish community in Budapest, like the Weiss buildings in Lipót körút (1903), were at the beginning oft their career, mostly characterized by the Viennese influences (see the buildings in Szabadság tér, 1901, and the Király bazaar, 1902) as stated by Ferenc Merényi. In this case a neo-baroque reference, far from the Wagnerschule, is clear, creating a difference in an architectural landscape mostly filled by pavilion with visible wooden or wooden-like structures, related to the national theme of woods, forests and wood industry. Other pavilions with neo-baroque shape were the one of the Croatian wines and the ones of the Hungarian champagne companies by the Braun brothers and by J.E. Hubert. A Gödöllö-like baroque dome crowned the central part of the pavilion of the pastry shop Gerbeaud (already built as Royal Pavilion for the exhibition in 1885, but newly adapted and decorated). According to this survey we can say that if themes as industry or agriculture were really “national” and requested pavilions with visible wooden or wooden-like structure, the theme of eating and drinking, less “serious”, could be represented by light and pompous architectures whose roots were intended in the baroque eclecticism.