Museum of Applied Arts

Look up before you look in. Above the traffic of Üllői Avenue, the roof of this building flashes green and gold in the light. The colour comes from glazed ceramic tiles, laid in patterns like the scales of some enormous creature. On a grey Budapest morning they glow softly. After rain they shine like wet leaves. Few buildings in the city carry their colour this high, and once you notice it, the plain stone streets around it look quieter than before.

This is the Museum of Applied Arts — in Hungarian, the Iparművészeti Múzeum. Applied arts are the arts of useful things. Chairs and cabinets, glass and silver, textiles, ceramics, books, jewellery. The objects people actually lived with, made by hands that wanted them to be beautiful as well as practical. The museum was founded in 1872, and it is usually described as one of the earliest institutions of its kind in the world, following the pioneering museums in London and Vienna.

That timing matters. In the second half of the nineteenth century, factories were changing how objects were made. Many people in Europe worried that machine production was making ordinary things cheap and ugly. Museums like this one were a response. The idea was simple — collect the finest examples of craft, show them to designers, manufacturers and the public, and raise the standard of everyday design. So this was never meant to be a quiet treasure house. It was meant to teach.

The building you are standing in front of came later. It was designed by Ödön Lechner, working with his partner Gyula Pártos, and it opened in 1896. That year was a big one for Hungary. The country was celebrating a thousand years since the arrival of the Hungarian tribes in the Carpathian Basin, and Budapest built heavily for the occasion. Emperor Franz Joseph, who was also King of Hungary, attended the opening of this museum.

Lechner is the key to understanding what you see. He wanted a modern architecture that was distinctly Hungarian, not borrowed from Paris or Vienna. He looked to Hungarian folk art — embroidery, carved wood, painted furniture. He also looked further east, to Persian and Indian design, because many people at the time believed the Hungarian people had deep eastern roots. Today he is often called the father of Hungarian Art Nouveau, the decorative style of curving lines and natural forms that swept Europe around 1900.

Now look again at those roof tiles, and at the yellow ceramic details around the entrance. They were made by the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, a city in southern Hungary. Zsolnay developed glazes that could survive frost and rain, which made colourful ceramic practical on the outside of a building. Here is something many visitors miss. Lechner used ceramic not only as decoration but as a statement about the museum itself — an applied arts museum dressed in Hungarian applied art.

The entrance is a good place to slow down. The doorway feels almost like the gate of a palace from a story book, with its rounded, layered arch and its ceramic trim. Notice how the ornament is not stuck onto flat walls. It flows around openings and along edges, and the lines curve rather than break at sharp angles. Lechner liked movement. Even in brick and tile, the building seems to grow rather than simply stand.

Then comes the second surprise. After all that colour outside, the interior hall is white. Bright, airy, and light, under a large glass roof. The arches and galleries carry delicate patterns that recall Islamic and Indian architecture, with pointed and lobed shapes repeated around the space. On a sunny day the light falls straight down into the hall and the white surfaces almost hum with it. The contrast is deliberate — the outside calls to the street, the inside clears the mind for looking at objects.

The building has not had an easy life. It was damaged during the Second World War, and again in the fighting of 1956, when Hungarians rose against Soviet control. Repairs over the decades did not always respect Lechner's original design. In recent years the museum has been through a long, major renovation, so parts of the building and collection may be closed or arranged differently from older descriptions. It is worth checking what is open before you plan your visit around a particular room.

The collection itself is wide. It ranges across European furniture, Hungarian and international ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, and bookbinding, along with objects from Asia and the Islamic world. One of its most celebrated holdings is linked to the Esterházy family, one of the most powerful noble houses in Hungarian history. Their treasury included goldsmith work and jewellery of real splendour. Seeing such pieces reminds you that luxury objects were also tools of power — ways for a family to show its rank.

The museum also holds a strong Art Nouveau collection, which makes sense inside a building like this. Around 1900, this museum was not only collecting the past. It was buying the new design of its own time, including work from across Europe. So when you see a vase or a lamp from that era here, you are looking at something that was considered modern, even daring, when it first arrived. The building and the objects belong to the same conversation.

Step back from the museum for a moment and take in the neighbourhood. This is the Ferencváros district, the ninth district of Budapest. Üllői Avenue is a busy, practical road, lined with apartment blocks, university buildings, and trams and buses moving steadily past. The museum does not sit in a park or on a grand square. It stands right on a working street. That suits it. Applied art was always meant to live close to ordinary life.

If you walk a little along the avenue, try turning back for a view of the roofline. From a short distance, the green and gold tiles and the small towers and dormers become easier to read as one composition. Lechner went on to design other buildings in Budapest with similar ceramic roofs, so once your eye learns this style, you may start spotting his influence elsewhere in the city — glazed tiles, folk-like patterns, and curving, organic forms.

Before you go, stand still for a final minute. Listen to the trams on the avenue and look at how the light moves across the tiles as clouds pass. More than a century ago, someone decided that a museum about useful, beautiful things deserved a building that was useful and beautiful too. As you walk away, notice the door handles, the railings, the paving under your feet. Every one of them was designed by someone. That is the quiet lesson this building has been teaching since it opened.