László Hudec: Shanghai’s Master Builder

In celebration of László Hudec’s 131st birthday on January 8, we’re doing a two-part tour of his buildings, the icons and the hidden gems, January 7 and 28. For more information, click here.

It’s likely that you know Hudec’s buildings: The I.S.S. Building/Normandie (Wukang Apartments), that red brick beauty shaped like a streamlined 1930s cruise ship, where hundreds gather daily, like the waves of the building, to snap a photo. The Park Hotel, the dramatic Art Deco building that was Shanghai’s first skyscraper and tallest building for over 50 years, another favorite spot for photos. There’s the Grand Theater, a fantasy movie palace, the Gothic Art Deco True Light Building at the RockBund, the dramatic, sweeping curves of the Woo Villa—and more, many MANY more: a whopping sixty Hudec buildings survive.

Who was this man, this immensely talented architect who could build in whatever style his clients required—neoclassical, Art Deco, Federalist–whose buildings still seem cutting-edge, who is so beloved by locals that he was the only foreigner listed in the 99 Symbols of Shanghai?

For nearly three decades, from 1918-1945, Lászlo Hudec was Shanghai’s master builder, designing buildings so spectacular they remain modern icons. He was one of a group of talented international architects who would, in the 1930s, transform the city’s landscape, giving Shanghai the modern look that defines it to this day.

The Early Years

Hudec was born on January 8, 1893 in Besztercebánya, Hungary (now Banská Bystrica, Slovakia), to György Hugyecz, a builder, and Paula Skultéty, daughter of a Lutheran minister. György Hugyecz worked on the construction of the Budapest underground, the oldest metro in continental Europe, and later started his own building firm. As a schoolboy, young Hudec spent his summers working with his father on construction sites and acquiring skills that would make him stand out in his architectural career: bricklaying, masonry, carpentry. In 1910, Hudec enrolled as an architecture student at Budapest Technical University, graduating in 1914.

Just weeks after his graduation, though, World War I erupted, and Hudec entered the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1915, he was sent to the Russian front where his architectural training proved useful in being able to quickly draw maps of the terrain. But on June 6, 1916, Hudec and his division were captured by the Russian Army—Hudec was struck on the head, and collapsed–and sent first to the field hospital and then to the prison camp Krasnaya Rechka prison camp in Khabarovsk, Siberia.

The Dramatic Escape

Misfortune dogged Hudec in the prison camp: first he contracted typhoid, and then broke his leg in several places—but this calamity turned out to have an unexpected silver lining.

His injury made him eligible to be transferred back to Europe by the Red Cross, and in the spring of 1918, Hudec found himself on a train ostensibly headed for Europe—but it didn’t get far. The Russian Civil War left that train stranded on the tracks, near Lake Baikal, for several weeks, and Hudec—broken leg nonwithstanding–took the opportunity to jump off the train and escape, with several of his fellow soldiers.

They made their way to Harbin, and then, on October 26 1918, Hudec arrived in Shanghai, just another poor refugee in the teeming city. But this poor refugee had mad skills, ones perfectly suited to the time and place in which he had found himself.

Hudec in Shanghai

Money was flowing into the cosmopolitan city, and newly minted tycoons and millionaires – Western and Chinese — wanted to show off with grand institutions and mansions in the latest styles. By November of 1918, Hudec had found himself a job as a designer in the office of the American architect Rowland A. Curry. His first project with Curry was the American Club, and with Curry, he would go on to build the Normandie, the Madier Villa, and the McTyiere School, among others.

Shanghai was clearly Hudec’s city, and he began putting down roots. In 1922, he married Gisela Mayer, who was born in Shanghai to a German father and a Scottish mother; the couple had three children.

In 1925 he left Curry to start his own company, L. E. Hudec, designing a wide range of buildings, in a wide variety of styles: grand villas and sleek apartment houses, churches, hospitals, cinemas, residential compounds, and two of his own homes, working with big real estate developers and wealthy individuals, foreign and Chinese.

Hu-Deco

Hudec’s Art Deco deserves a special mention. Shanghai’s first Art Deco may have come from France, but Hudec’s inspiration clearly came from America. One look at the Park Hotel and you can see the debt it owes to Hood’s American Radiator building; the same goes for the Normandie and the Flatiron. 

SEPARATED AT BIRTH? From left: American Radiator Building, New York (1924); Park Hotel Shanghai (1934); Flatiron Building, New York (1902); I.S.S. Building /Normandie (1924).

American Art Deco is distinguished from its French counterpart by simplicity, streamlining, machine-age inspirations, but most of all, for the skyscraper. And this was Hudec’s contribution to the Shanghai skyline: the 22-storey Park Hotel, the first skyscraper in Asia and Shanghai’s tallest building well into the 1980s. World-famous architect I.M. Pei recalled coming out of the Grand Theater next door, looking up at the spectacular profile of the Park Hotel, and knowing then that creating buildings was going to be his life’s work.

Today, surrounded by giant buildings battling for skyscraper supremacy, it’s hard to imagine both the wonder and pride that the Park Hotel generated. It was such that even during the post-1949 era, when the capitalism that had built this monument had been banished, the Park Hotel retained pride of place as a backdrop for photographs.

Honorary Consul

In 1938, Hudec completed another Art Deco masterpiece, the ‘Green House’, the green-tiled residence of paint industry tycoon Wu Tongwen. That same year, Czechoslovakia was dissolved under the Munich agreement and Hudec lost his Czechoslovak citizenship. He applied for a Hungarian passport and obtained it in 1941; in 1942, he was appointed Honorary Consul of Hungary in Shanghai, and used his position to save Jewish families. He employed Hungarian Jews in his Consulate, provided passports, and fought with the Japanese military authorities to keep former Hungarian subjects out of Shanghai’s Jewish ghetto. Letters, written after the war, by Jewish Hungarians expressing their gratitude to Hudec for saving them from the ghetto.

Well aware of the winds of change, Hudec and his family left China in 1947 for Europe, and in 1950 for the US. Hudec had been sending money from Shanghai to Switzerland, and as a result, was comfortably well off. He spent the last years of his life in California teaching and researching one of his great interests, early Christian philosophy and culture, at the University of California at Berkeley. He died, of a heart attack, on October 26, 1958–40 years, to the day, after he first arrived in Shanghai. He is buried, according to his wishes, in the town of his birth – Banská Bystrica, Slovakia.

Hudec never returned to Shanghai, but he is everywhere in the city he built. Over 28 years, the man who had arrived in Shanghai by chance designed and built over 100 buildings, more than half of which survive to this day, still as modern and cutting-edge as ever.

SOURCES

http://www.ladislavhudec.eu/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=67

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/09/07/hudec-the-architect-who-made-shanghai/

Almasy, Nicky, Hudec (2017)

Janossy, Peter Samuel and Deke Erh, Life and Work of Laszlo Hudec (2010)

Shanghai Planning Department & Shanghai Construction Archives, Hudec’s Architecture in Shanghai