Tomb for a Prince

Mausolea and the burial sites of national heroes attracted the interest not only of architecture students but also of several leading architects of the period, among them István Medgyaszay and Móric Pogány. Kós’s Mausoleum of Attila, commemorating the legendary leader of the Hun Empire, employs a restrained use of stone with limited historical reference, achieving a monumental effect through a process of abstraction. This sense of monumentality is notably absent from the more over-detailed representations of certain other designs, such as the Rural Church.

The longitudinal arrangement emphasized by a large central dome or a spacious central hall also appears in the Finnish Pavilion in Paris (1900), followed by the Hungarian Pavilion at the Turin Exhibition (Tőry, Pogány and Györgyi, 1911), as well as in the Bird House (Kós and Zrumeczky, 1908–1912) and the Palm House (Károly Räde, Keresztély Ilsemann) of the Budapest Zoo. These forms can be interpreted as monumental stone evocations of the tents of King Attila and the ancient Huns. Above the main entrance, the inscription “Attila” is prominently displayed.