Humor in Architecture: Jewish Wit on Béla Lajta’s Buildings

1 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York, 1977); id., The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (Chichester, West Sussex, 2011). Architectural humor probably began with Mannerism and partly as early as in the Middle Ages as grotesque diabolic symbols, although not for making fun; see Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA, 1986). 2 Peter Eisenman, Re-working Eisenman (London, 1993). Eisenman developed complex theories in which there is a Jewish subtext, but while talking with him he always refused to admit any link to Jewish thought. See György Kunst and Rudolf Klein, Peter Eisenman: From Deconstruction to Folding (Budapest, 1999). Perhaps . hutzpah (see below, n. 30) is the only exception that he admits. However, even prior to Introduction In the present article I posit a link between the “architectural jokes” by Jewish-Hungarian architect Béla Lajta (born Béla Leitersdorfer, 1873–1920) and Jewish wit in fin-desiècle Hungary. By applying humor theories, I look at their formal artistic manifestation and socio-political import in the context of both the intellectual history of the Habsburg Empire and the framework of Jewish–Christian relationships in modern Europe. The analysis of Jewish humor is especially challenging, as it reflects a complex web of the minority’s human, cultural, and religious relationships with the surrounding majority. Humor is often associated with the grotesque and a neglect or denial of tectonic principles in architecture characteristic of the heyday of postmodernism:1 manifestations of humor in contemporary architecture are sometimes related to deconstruction, although their presumably Jewish aspects elude purposeful analysis.2 However, mere grotesque and distortion, erroneous tectonics, or unconventional design may make architecture weird or depressing rather than “humoristic.” I suggest that humor in architecture should exceed the medium and refer to extraneous contents, just as the simple text of a joke often refers to content beyond the given discourse.