Laszlo Hudek is the architect who built many of Shanghai's most striking buildings from the first half of the 20th century.
He was born in 1893 in Austria-Hungary, the son of the architect György Chudjec, graduated from the Hungarian Royal University in Budapest and joined the Society of Hungarian Architects in 1916 when he was drafted into the army. He took part in hostilities against Russia, was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia, near the Chinese border. In 1918 he managed to escape. After moving to Shanghai, he got a job as a draftsman in the American workshop of R. A. Curry, where he soon became a leading architect and then one of the managing partners. At the same time, he changed his surname to a more easily pronounced one for foreigners, Hudek.
In 1925 Laszlo Hudek opened his own office and began to receive the first large orders. His work is varied: some projects belong to historical styles, others to Art Deco, some examples to the modern movement. They largely shaped the appearance of Shanghai until the end of the 1940s, when the city was the most important economic center of East Asia and there was active construction of both public buildings and private houses.
Despite the lack of a clear stylistic line, Hudek had an undeniable taste, which allowed him to create successful projects in different directions. At the same time, along with other Western architects who worked in Shanghai at that time, he also fulfilled the cultural mission, demonstrating with his buildings (there are about 50 of them in the city) the diversity of European architecture.
Laszlo Hudek's most famous building is the Park Hotel (1931-1934), a steel-framed Art Deco skyscraper 86 m high (22 floors), which remained the tallest building in Asia until 1952 and Shanghai until the early 1980s.
Also an excellent example of Art Deco, not inferior to American models, can be called the Daguanming cinema (Grand Theater) (1933) for 1900 spectators.
Huadong neoclassical hospital (1926) continues the line that Hudek adhered to while working in the workshop of R. A. Curry, and the Methodist Moore Memorial Church (1928-1931) is built in the brick neo-Gothic style.
Villa D. V. Wu (1938) is one of the finest examples of the architecture of the modern movement in China.
In 1947 Laszlo Hudek, then the Honorary Consul of Hungary in Shanghai, left China due to the aggravation of the political situation. He settled with his family in Lugano, later moved to Rome, when Pope Pius XII invited him to take part in the excavation of the tomb of St. Peter. In 1950, Hudek moved to Berkeley, where he was invited to teach at the University of California. There he died in 1958.
