László Hudec

Why Shanghai knows the name

László Hudec (邬达克, Wūdákè) is the architect behind more of Shanghai’s best-known buildings than anyone else of his generation: the Park Hotel, the Grand Theatre and Moore Memorial Church, and, if you accept the usual attribution, Wukang Mansion. He was a Hungarian prisoner of war who reached the city in 1918 with a forged identity and no money, and he was working for himself by 1925. The city’s Chinese bankers and businessmen made him their architect of choice. By the early 1930s he had put up the tallest building in the Far East for them.

Where did he come from, and how did he get to Shanghai?

He was born László Ede Hugyecz in Banská Bystrica (Besztercebánya in Hungarian) on 8 January 1893. Lukovich calls him the eldest of six children. His father György, a self-made master builder, put the boy on building sites in the school holidays. By the time Hudec entered the Royal Hungarian Joseph University of Technology in Budapest in 1910, the Hudec Project says, he had passed trade exams as a stonemason and a carpenter. He graduated in 1914 and started work in the office of Ervin Ybl. English Wikipedia gives 1911 for the start of his studies; the other two give 1910.

The war ended that career before it began. He was called up, and in June 1916, wounded, he was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia. Lukovich puts him in a camp at Khabarovsk, and says his languages and his trade got him design work and a place on building sites; in 1917 he had typhoid and broke a leg that left him with a limp. In the spring of 1918 he got out.

How he got out depends on who tells it, and the accounts do not fit together. The Hudec Project, and Pigniczky in the Hungarian Review, say that he used his Russian and a false passport and walked south-east for the Chinese border; Pigniczky has him in Harbin by early October. Lukovich says he was on a Red Cross train of disabled prisoners that was stuck for weeks near the border, and that he and a few comrades took a rail trolley. The thesis by Lenore Hietkamp, written from the Hudec archive and from interviews with his widow, says that he escaped from a transport train and worked his way down the line then being built from Harbin. English Wikipedia says he jumped from a train. Heathcote in Apollo says the train stopped near Lake Baikal. The legend of the leap from the train fits some of this, but not the trolley or the long walk. What all of them share is the date, 1918, and the result.

He reached Shanghai in early November 1918. The Hudec Project says the Russian consulate wrote his name out from Cyrillic, which is how Hugyecz became Hudec. Hietkamp adds a detail from her interview with Gisella Hudec: on the road and in Shanghai he told foreigners he was from Latvia, to explain his accent without admitting to coming from a defeated country. He took a job as a draughtsman for the American architect R. A. Curry, who built houses, offices and schools in an American manner.

What did he learn working for Curry?

Hietkamp estimates that he spent his first five or six years with Curry and did most of the drawings. Her list of known commissions has Hudec and Curry together on an International Savings Society building in 1919, the Chinese American Bank of Commerce in 1920, the McTyiere School in 1922 and the American Club in 1923. Heathcote adds the Normandie Apartments of 1924, and the Sixth Tone article on that building says Hudec drew the plans as Curry’s employee.

In between there was a trip home. Pigniczky says that he went back to Europe in 1920, around the time his father died, and returned in 1921 to run Curry’s office; Lukovich says the Treaty of Trianon had put Banská Bystrica in the new Czechoslovakia, the family firm failed, and the family moved to Budapest. He never got his career back there. In 1922 he married Gisella Meyer, who was born in Shanghai to a German merchant from Bremen and a British mother. Hietkamp says 1921; the other accounts say 1922. They had three children, Theodore in 1923, Martin in 1925 and Alessa in 1928.

Why did Chinese clients choose a Hungarian?

In 1925 Hudec opened his own office, L. E. Hudec Architecture. His new clients came from the Chinese banks and companies that were getting rich in the 1920s, and the Hudec Project and Hietkamp both stress something about his position. Hungary had not signed a treaty with China after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so a Hungarian was not covered by the extraterritorial rights that British, French and American residents had. The Hudec Project says that his Chinese clients knew he was subject to Chinese law. Hietkamp says that he was careful about it in private: he forbade his wife to drive, for fear of an accident that would leave her in a Chinese court with no consul to help.

The clients Hietkamp lists are the Methodist congregation of Moore Memorial Church, a funeral society, the Chinese municipality of Greater Shanghai, a theatre company and the four banks behind the Joint Savings Society. She stops short of explaining how the relationship started. She notes that Curry had drawn up a proposal for the Shanghai Bankers’ Association, and that is as close as she gets.

The key client was the Joint Savings Society (四行储蓄会, Sìháng Chǔxùhuì). It was founded in 1923 by four banks, Yien-yieh, Kincheng, China and South Sea, and Continental. Hudec built its headquarters at Szechuan Road and Hankow Road in 1928, and, Hietkamp says, the Society recommended him on the strength of it as “eminently satisfactory”. That commission led to the largest one.

How did the Park Hotel get built?

The Society wanted a landmark to mark its tenth anniversary in 1933. The Hudec Project says Hudec won the tender in 1931, and the Park Hotel (国际饭店, Guójì Fàndiàn) opened on 1 December 1934. It was a bank and a hotel in one building. Hietkamp says the Society kept the basement vaults and much of the ground floor, and the hotel was run by a management company whose directors overlapped with the Society’s board. It has 22 storeys above ground and two below.

Nothing like it had been tried in the city. The nearest in height, the Cathay Hotel, had 17 storeys. Hudec had travelled to the United States, and Pigniczky says he went to the US and Germany in the late 1920s to study steel construction. Lukovich notes a resemblance to the Radiator Building in New York. The soft Shanghai soil was the problem. Hietkamp describes 400 Oregon-pine piles under a concrete raft, but adds that other accounts give different dimensions; Lukovich gives 33 m wooden piles imported from Canada. The two disagree, and the thesis acknowledges that its own sources do too. What is safe to say is that the foundation was long timber piles under a raft, with a deep basement to offset the tower’s weight.

The height is also recorded in two ways. English Wikipedia and Lukovich give 83.8 m. Hietkamp, citing the contractors’ own journal, gives 284 feet (about 87 m) from street level to the flag platform and 300 feet with the spire. The two are probably measured to different points, but none of the sources says so.

What do the sources disagree on?

How tall, for how long. When the project was announced in 1931 the China Press headline called it the tallest skyscraper on four continents. By 1933 a trade review was calling it the tallest building between London and Tokyo. Those are claims made at the time. Later writers pin an end date on the record, and no two agree. The Hudec Project says it was the tallest in Asia until 1982. English Wikipedia says Asia until 1963, China until 1966 and Shanghai until 1983. Heathcote also says 1963. Lukovich says 1934 to 1963 in his introduction and 1952 in the body of the same paper, and Shanghai until 1984. Take the dates as the claims of writers, not as a record.

How many buildings. The Hudec Project says more than a hundred. Yicai, reporting the closure of the Hudec Memorial Hall in 2024, says over a hundred in Shanghai, 35 of them listed as outstanding modern buildings. Jiemian News says over a hundred with 25 listed. Lukovich says about 44 still stand, all listed. Pigniczky writes of over 70 buildings. The popular line that Hudec designed a fixed fraction of the city’s heritage buildings does not appear in any of these. The lists are counted differently, with different rules for demolished buildings, for projects with Curry, and for what counts as one building.

When was Wukang Mansion built? The Hudec Project, Heathcote, Sixth Tone and the Shanghai gazetteer say 1924. English Wikipedia’s list of works gives 1926. The earlier date fits the fact that he drew the plans while still employed by Curry.

When did he become consul? See below.

Which other buildings define his career?

Wukang Mansion (武康大楼, Wǔkāng Dàlóu) was the Normandie Apartments, built in 1924 by the International Savings Society’s property company on a triangular plot at the junction of Huaihai Road and Wukang Road. The French firm Remond & Collet built it. Seen from the west it resembles the prow of a large ship, which is the basis of the claim that the building is named for one; nothing the sources say supports that. They record the name Normandie from the start and say nothing of its origin.

Moore Memorial Church (沐恩堂, Mù’ēn Táng) is a Methodist church on Xizang Middle Road that opened in 1931. The congregation was Chinese. Hietkamp’s list shows the commission dating from 1926, with the building following in the early 1930s. Lukovich adds that Hudec designed churches free of charge, without giving a source.

The Grand Theatre (大光明电影院, Dàguāngmíng Diànyǐngyuàn), beside the Park Hotel on the old Bubbling Well Road, took shape in 1931–1933. The Hudec Project gives it 2,500 seats and calls it the largest theatre in Shanghai.

The Country Hospital on Great Western Road (now Yan’an West Road) is a 1926 commission in Hietkamp’s list; today it is the Huadong Hospital. Lukovich says Hudec got two of his younger sisters jobs as nurses there.

The Union Brewery at 130 Yichang Road sits beside Suzhou Creek. The company had been reorganised in 1931 with new investors, among them E. D. Sassoon & Co., and Hudec was hired to design a new factory. Touch Shanghai, the city information office’s site, says it was completed in 1934 and began production in 1936. Historic Shanghai says it opened in 1936 and Hietkamp lists 1932–33. Parts survive, including the bottling hall, brew house and offices, and Touch Shanghai says the buildings were listed in 1999 and nearly pulled down in 2002.

The Green House (绿房子, Lǜ Fángzi) at 333 Tongren Road was built for Wu Tongwen (吴同文, Wú Tóngwén), a paint merchant who, the Paper says, made his fortune from military-green paint. It is a four-storey house of more than 1,700 square metres covered in green glazed tiles. Heathcote dates it 1938, Hietkamp lists a house of 1938 for D. V. Wood (or Woo), and English Wikipedia’s list of works says 1937. The Shanghai government’s archive page describes it as one of the last big works he did in the city.

Where did he live?

He built his own house on Columbia Road, now 129 Panyu Road. The Hudec Project says it was finished by 1931 and has a half-timbered facade; the University of Victoria holds the heating and plumbing drawings, dated 1930. The family lived in it for about seven years before letting it and moving into Hubertus Court, a ten-storey apartment block that, the Hudec Project says, Hudec had designed himself. Hietkamp dates Hubertus Court to 1936. In 2013 the entrepreneur Liu Suhua (刘素华) restored the house and opened the Hudec Memorial Hall there. Yicai reports that it closed after 4 February 2024, having had over a million visitors, with a single-day record above 10,000.

What happened in the war years?

The building boom ended. Lukovich says commissions dried up by 1935, and that after the Japanese attack of 1937 the office shrank to four employees. Pigniczky says he turned to leading the Central European community. His sons were sent to a cadet school in Victoria, Canada, in 1937.

In the war he took on a diplomatic role, and the sources disagree about when. Hietkamp, who cites an unpublished biography, says the late 1930s. English Wikipedia says 1941, after he obtained a Hungarian passport. The Hudec Project, Pigniczky and Heathcote say 1942, and Lukovich 1943. A Hungarian honorary consul general, Paul Komor, held office in Shanghai from 1938 to 1941, so the roles may not have overlapped. Hietkamp says his Hungarian status kept the family out of Japanese internment.

Did Hudec help Jewish refugees? Pigniczky says that as consul he issued passports to people from the successor states of Austria-Hungary, which allowed them to leave the Hongkou designated area, and that when the Arrow Cross took power in Hungary in October 1944 he declared that the consulate no longer pledged allegiance to the government, a move that nearly got him arrested. Lukovich says he helped many Jewish people to leave for Australia and the US. No source read here names a person he helped, counts them, or cites a consular record. The documented passport scheme was Komor’s: his International Committee, set up in 1938 with Victor Sassoon’s money, issued passports to Jewish refugees whose German passports had been withdrawn. The claim about Hudec may be true, but on this evidence it is a tradition, not a record.

What happened after 1947?

The family left in 1947 in secret, and the Hudec Project says Hudec, his wife and daughter never returned. English Wikipedia says they went to Switzerland and Rome before settling in Berkeley in 1950, and Lukovich puts Lugano in 1948. He did not practise as an architect again. He became interested in archaeology, visited the closed Vatican excavations under St Peter’s in 1947 and 1953, lectured on them in 1949 and published on the subject in 1950 and 1952. He died on 26 October 1958; English Wikipedia says in Berkeley, of a heart attack. Gisella lived until 2001 and gave his papers to the University of Victoria, whose Hudec Collection Hietkamp used for her thesis.

The recovery of his reputation in China began in the 2000s. Pigniczky lists a Hungarian “Year of Hudec” in Shanghai in 2008, an exhibition in 2009 and an Expo conference in 2010.

What to look for

Start at People’s Square. The Park Hotel stands on Nanjing West Road facing the park, and the Grand Theatre is next door. Moore Memorial Church is a few minutes’ walk along Xizang Middle Road. The Joint Savings Society’s old headquarters is east of the square near Sichuan Road, and nothing in the sources used here confirms what stands there now.

West of the centre, Wukang Mansion is where Huaihai Road meets Wukang Road; stand west of it on Huaihai Road and look east to see the wedge. The Green House is on Tongren Road at Beijing West Road, and Hudec’s own house is at 129 Panyu Road. The memorial hall there closed in February 2024, so ask before travelling whether the house is open at all. The Union Brewery buildings lie along Suzhou Creek at 130 Yichang Road. Whether each of these is open to visitors was not checked for this profile.