Gyula Pártos


Gyula Pártos was a Hungarian architect. Together with Ödön Lechner he designed a number of buildings in the typical Szecesszió (Art Nouveau) style of fin-de-siècle Hungary. He was the brother-in-law of the lawyer and politician Béla Pártos, the husband of opera singer Vittorina Bartolucci, and the father-in-law of composer and opera director Miklós Radnai.

Career

At the beginning of his career he studied under Antal Szkalnitzky in Buda, who was responsible for a large number of the monumental public buildings that shaped the city and its sister across the Danube, Pest, before the two cities merged in 1873. He then moved on to the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, where he was a classmate of both Alajos Hauszmann and Ödön Lechner, and obtained a degree in architecture in 1870.
After graduation Pártos and Lechner established a fruitful partnership which lasted until 1896, crowned by their ultimate work, the design of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts. Supposedly, Lechner was in charge of most of the artistic aspects of the practice, while Pártos took command of the organizational tasks. However, Pártos proved to be a capable designer in his own right, and a number of their works can be attributed wholly or nearly entirely to him, including St. Stephen's Church and Kalmár Chapel, both in Kiskunfélegyháza; as well as the Bazaar of the Reformed Church in Kecskemét.
Working independently after 1896, he received numerous commissions over the next 16 years in the capital as well as in Győr, Cegléd, and Bratislava. Some of these designs followed in Lechner's footsteps but others reflect the historicism in which he was trained. He died in Budapest at age 71, two years after Lechner, in the midst of the First World War.

Works