MÁV property in Rákosrendező (Photo: Magyar Hang/Zsolt László Szabó)
The Orbán government is planning to build a “mini-Dubai”, a district crowded with 240-meter skyscrapers, which is a fatal wound on Budapest’s panorama, disfiguring Hősök Square, on the site of Rákosrendező. On the topic of construction, we summarized the history of Hungarian high-rise buildings (realized and left on paper).
I don’t see the Madách houses. In their place stands a huge, thirty-story skyscraper reminiscent of its Manhattan brothers. The effect is eclectic: the friezes and cornices are classicizers. Next to the building, the yellow block of the Anker Palace dwarfs the striking roof. Hugó Gregersen’s 1928, artistic drawing of the huge tower block is astonishing. A former employee of Vállálkozók Lapja may have felt the same way, who rightly noted that it “gets into an unpleasant controversy with the Anker house. Undoubtedly, Hugó Gregersen, an excellent draftsman, would do well to take into account the environment of the ideals of architecture…” (The planned thirty-story building was replaced ten years later by the red brick Madách houses, which harmonize with the environment.)
The skyscraper phenomenon captured the imagination not only of the daring architect, but also of the journalist. Just one year later – perhaps inspired by the ideas of Gregersen, who dreamed of a similar mammoth building on the site of the Rókus hospital and chapel – György Pakots reported on Budapest in 1979 in an imaginary report: “The new, 30-story city hall stood tall at the mouth of Erzsébet avenue. The airless, narrow streets next to the boulevard disappeared, and the wide roads were lined with huge skyscrapers… All the way along the boulevard, high-speed trains ran on high iron pillars, and cars rushed down the road at a dizzying pace.” (In the text, we can even discover the Budapest of 1979 – as an unpretentious state socialist distortion of Pakots’s imagination. Except for a few thoughts: “The colonnade of the Rudolf wharf walked with glasses in hand, those seeking healing, numerous drinking halls awaited the sick.”)
• What high-rise buildings have been planned for Budapest in recent decades?
• Which districts would have fallen victim to the developments?
• Why did none of these come true?
