Abrahám/en
Later in the decade he would create the Esterházy Castle in St. Abraham, Hungary – a pleasure palace with its white marble facade decorated with gold medallions and floral patterns and its individual rooms that were riots of color, pattern, and geometric shapes.
Urban's early work, although for a limited clientele, was highly visible in that he worked for a prominent Hungarian family, the Esterházys, and he was commissioned by the imperial family to produce two large–scale temporary installations for important court functions.
The first of these, a bridge connecting the Künstlerhaus and the Musikverein, was perhaps the most original work of his Viennese years. This powerful geometric endeavor of 1898, although temporary, was remarkable for the way it linked two massive, academic, historicist buildings with a form, ornament, and materials that did nothing to unite it aesthetically with the two extant structures. Certainly, the decorative vocabulary used for this passageway by the young Urban was indebted to the highly individual ornamental language that had been so brilliantly developed by Olbrich during the two previous years and which was well known to Urban by that time.
- Official homepage: http://www.obecabraham.sk
- Work of Joseph Urban
