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Volume 4 | Issue 4 - Forgotten People
Article by Juraj Sott. Edited and Researched by Rob Russell.
The Slovak-Hungarian architect Ladislav Edvard Hudec is famous for his architectural works carried out in Shanghai between 1918-1945. Despite having influenced Shanghai’s architecture on a great scale, Hudec’s persona was almost entirely forgotten, especially in his homeland. Hudec was born on January 8, 1893 in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in the city of Banska Bystrica, which is nowadays located in Slovakia. The fact that he came from a wealthy Lutheran family allowed him to receive a good education. His father Juraj Hudec, a magyarized Slovak, was not only a leading master builder in the city, but also the main inspiration for little Ladislav to take an interest in architecture and engineering. As a schoolboy, Ladislav spent all his summers on the construction works of his father. During his grammar school studies, he acquired three different certificates of apprenticeship – professions of bricklayer, stonemason and carpenter. In 1910, Hudec enrolled in the Technical University in Budapest, where he obtained his diploma in 1914. After the outbreak of First World War, the young architect enlisted in the army. Even though it might not sound like a remarkable tale up to this point, the events of World War I really kicked off his extraordinary story of luck, hard work and success.
In 1915, Hudec fought on the Eastern Front was injured and then caught by the Russian army in 1916, which sent him to the Sibirian prison camp Krasnaya Rechka. When he recovered from his leg injury (and casually learnt five languages in the meantime!), he managed to jump from a train near the Chinese border and made his way to Shanghai in November 1918. Having had spent four years either fighting or imprisoned, Hudec did not fail to grasp the chance to start afresh in the ‘Paris of the East’.
The young architect managed to find a job as a designer in the office of the American architect R. A. Curry. In 1922, Hudec married Gizela Mayer and three years later he started his own company, named L. E. Hudec Architect Shanghai. Over the following 28 years he designed and built more then 60 buildings, half of which have become part of the official cultural heritage. He built his most renowned building—the 22-storey Park Hotel—between 1932-1934 and it had remained the tallest building in Shanghai for next unbelievable 49 years. Having used a completely steel construction, the architect found the technological solution to erect the structure in difficult geological conditions of marshy subsoil. However, Park Hotel is just a tip of the iceberg. Thanks to Hudec we can find neo-classicism, art deco, and first of all functionalism and modernism in many of his buildings in Shanghai, such as the Grand Theatre, Country Hospital, Joint Savings and Loan building, Union Brewery, etc.
Apart from the second half of the 1930s, which marked Hudec’s tendency to design his buildings in a modernist, functionalist style, the style characteristic for his work was eclecticism. The eclectic approach to architecture was becoming outdated in the 1930s; however, more than cutting-edge appearance of his buildings, Hudec took an interest in new technologies, functionality and overall perfection of the construction. Likewise, he considered himself more of an engineer than an architect.
As you may have expected, his adventurous journey did not end peacefully in Shanghai. A turbulent political situation was driving him away again. In years 1921 – 1941, Hudec used his Czechoslovakian passport. In 1938, after the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria by the Nazi Germany and the ensuing disintegration of Czechoslovakia, Hudec applied for Hungarian citizenship. In 1941, he received a Hungarian passport and was appointed Honorary Consul of Hungary in Shanghai. He used his post to save approximately 140 Jewish people from being prosecuted. In 1947, the civil war in the country forced Hudec and his family to leave China for Europe and later the United States, where he spent the last years of his life teaching and researching early Christian philosophy and culture at University of California, Berkeley. Had he wanted to work as an architect in the United States he would have had to obtain a necessary licence – but he lacked sufficient resolve for that at his age. That is the reason why all of his works (except for one little chapel in Slovakia, built in 1913) were built in Shanghai. He died of a heart attack at the age of 65 on June 14, 1958 in California, USA. Twelve years later, according to his own wish, his remains were repatriated to Slovakia and buried in Banska Bystrica.
How is it possible that the great story of Ladislav Hudec was nearly forgotten both in China and in his homeland? A part of the answer is that the communist regimes in China, Czechoslovakia and Hungary alike restricted perceived ‘imperialist’ architecture from the public. Fortunately this ideological crackdown on official culture has ended; Ladislav Hudec’s heritage has been rediscovered both in China and in Central Europe. In Shanghai, the year 2008 was proclaimed the year of Ladislav Hudec. The 120th anniversary of Hudec’s birth in January 2012 saw the opening of the Hudec Memorial Hall in Shanghai, which was renovated to house a permanent exhibition on his life and work. Furthermore, another exhibition in his birthplace in Banska Bystrica presented his works to the wider Slovak public in the same year. Despite these recent positive developments we have to make sure that Hudec’s persona is not misused for political squabbles between Slovak and Hungarian nationalists over the question of his ethnic origin. As much as he undoubtedly acknowledged both sides of his ancestry, in one of his letters he wrote: “It doesn’t matter where I go, I will always be a stranger, a guest, a Flying Dutchman, who is at home everywhere he goes, but still has no fatherland.” For this reason, I believe that the great heritage of Ladislav Hudec in the present creates a potential for genuine cooperation, rather than absurd nationalistic hostility.
The Park Hotel as designed by Ladislav Hudec was the tallest building in Asia between 1934 and 1958.
After opening his own practice in 1925 it is believed Hudec was involved in the design of 37 buildings by 1941.
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