Abstract:
Starting from the 1870s the development of museums and schools of industry started to take place next to the capitals in some important industrial cities of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Salzburg, Graz, Prague, Brno, Czernowitz). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century several schools and some museum buildings of industry were erected in Hungary. Some of these new edifices performed dual, educational and museum tasks due to their spatial arrangements, their list includes Ödön Lechner’s Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, Alajos Hauszmann’s Technologic Museum of Industry in Budapest and Lajos Pákei’s in Cluj/Kolozsvár/Klausenburg. Lajos Pákei graduated from the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied under Teophil Hansen and, in 1880 he became chief architect of the city of Cluj. As such and later as executive director of the school of industry and the director of the museum of industry, he played a prominent role in the infrastructural modernization of the city. One of the biggest investments of the city focused on reshaping the institutional structure of industrial in the early 1880s. This process was debated and articulated in connection with the foundation of the Museum and School of Industry.
Lajos Pákei was among the first generation of architects to graduate from the newly established educational institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In Cluj – similarly to Camillo Sitte in Vienna or Joseph Leitzner in Czernowitz – he completed diverse missions simultaneously: he actively reshaped the urban spaces of Cluj, he made architectural plans for the industrial museum and school, as director he introduced the educational profile of the school of industry and the acquisition policy of the museum of industry. The school-museum building was built between 1896 and 1898. Due to the rapidly growing collection, the shift in the acquisition policy from technological profile to applied arts objects, and the growing number of students, the building soon became too small, and the construction of a separate museum building has become necessary. The new building of the museum of industry was erected in 1903–1904 opposite the previous one, according to the plans of Lajos Pákei. The second edifice – planned purely for museum purposes – followed the latest example of applied art museum buildings, like Joseph Schulz’s in Prague built in 1897–1901.
The collection building strategy has significantly changed around 1900. Contemporary decorative art objects have begun to dominate the purchased and the director Lajos Pákei managed to acquire an important estate, the one of the interior designer Pál Horti who died in 1907. The post-1900 acquisitions were mainly composed of objects from leading French, English, Italian Swedish, Dutch, Belgian and Hungarian designers. Objects of such designers as the Daum Studio, Émile Gallé, Auguste Delaherche, Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat, Alexandre Bigot, the Wedgwood and Tiffany companies, Guido Minerbi or Angelo Bacchi were rarely seen objects in museum display in Transylvanian exhibitions at the late nineteenth century. Instead of the common spatial arrangement based on materials and techniques, originated in the principles of Gottfried Semper, Lajos Pákei has aimed at modernizing bourgeois apartment interiors in Cluj. In the ambient-like exhibition galleries of the museum contemporary design products were displayed together with the traditional peasant art inspired housing decoration of the region.
