Town Hall, New Wing, Sepsiszentgyörgy

The Town Hall, built between 1854 and 1858, accommodated not only the city council and the mayor’s office but also the Grand Hotel of Sepsiszentgyörgy, a hotel and casino, as well as elegant shops on the ground floor. The creation of the ceremonial hall of the Town Hall and its equipment with a permanent stage are associated with Mayor Ferenc Gödri. As a result, the building became a true center of the city’s social and cultural life. The first film screening was held here in 1905, and in 1912 the city’s permanent cinema, the “Electric Theatre,” opened in the same building.

The rapidly developing city soon faced a shortage of space in many of its institutions. The construction of a new town hall was long delayed due to successive challenges and the economic stagnation caused by the outbreak of the First World War. Ultimately, and somewhat unexpectedly, a fire-safety regulation issued in 1917 compelled the City Council to take decisive action. Through the mediation of Dr. Kristóf Fogolyán, hospital director, Károly Kós was commissioned to prepare sketch designs for a new town hall and cinema to be built for the Royal Free City of Sepsiszentgyörgy.

Based on the available evidence—original drawings by Kós discovered during archival research by Sándor Benczédi—the design presents a carefully considered, monumental building that would have integrally incorporated the house designed by Bálint Császár and would have formed a dignified completion of the row of buildings surrounding Liberty Square. A pointed-arch stone arcade concealing the main entrance supports the load of the upper storeys projecting from the street façade. Differences in ground level were resolved through internal staircases.

The two surviving façade drawings are characterized by features typical of Kós’s architecture: grouped, vertically oriented rectangular windows, gabled roof solutions, and an unusually tall stone cladding around the main entrance. The principal architectural accent of the town hall is the tower, articulated with stone quoins at its corners and rising prominently from the building mass. The most unusual aspect of the massing is the disproportionately small footprint of the tower spire relative to the tower itself, crowned with four small corner turrets—a solution comparable to that seen on the Giraffe House at the Budapest Zoo.

Unfortunately, the sketch designs prepared by Kós for the Town Hall, identified by the Sepsiszentgyörgy architect Sándor Benczédi, have survived only in fragmentary form. Indirect information about the missing drawings can be inferred from the execution plans prepared in the spring of 1927 by architect Dumitru Pascu. Later that same year, the new city administration abandoned the construction of the town hall. The idea resurfaced once more in 1938, based on an entirely different concept, but this attempt was likewise never realized.