The Condominium Idea in the First Half of the 20th Century in Budapest

In the first half of the 20th century, the idea of the family house and the suburb emerged in reduced form through the construction of condominiums in Budapest. While the suburb idea required intervention via urban development, and thus the involvement of public authorities, condominium construction was viable even the scale of a single plot. […]

Room, Kitchen, Kitchen Garden. The History of the Municipal Housing Project in Budapest, 1909 – 1913

Like other large cities in Europe, Budapest faced a serious housing shortage in the last decades of the 19th century. While this problem had many roots, the primary one was the growth of population through migration. In accordance with liberal principles, representatives in the city council rejected the idea of public intervention in the market […]

Budapest Urban Blocks and their Sustainability

INTRODUCTION One of the most significant current discussions in urban design is the redesigning and restructuring of urban places to achieve sustainability. There is a large volume of published studies describing specific criteria – that a sustainable city should be compact, dense, diverse and highly integrated (The Sustainable, 2004). In addition, design concepts of sustainable […]

Imre Steindl’s Neo-Gothic Approach in the Hungarian Design Competitions of the 1870st

Introduction The Plan Collection and Archives of the Department of History of Architecture and Monuments at the Budapest Technical University possesses many valuable drawings and photographs, including several documents related to Imre Steindl. The most signi€cant pieces of Steindl’s are the fourteen sheets of the Reichstag proposal plan of 1872, and a folder of original […]

The Urban Space of the Migrant Crisis: Analysis of the Spatial Evolution of an Informal Transit Camp in Budapest’s Historic City Centre

From June till September 2015, Baross Square in front of Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station became the temporary living area for thousands of refugees and migrants travelling to Western Europe. This unconventional use of one of the busiest squares in the historic centre gave rise to a new perception of the existing environment. The paper aims […]

The Forgotten Urbanist – Antal Palóczi

The practice of modern urban planning was somewhat delayed in turn-of-the-century Hungary (1867 – 1918). Consequently, it was not the innovators who developed the urban regulation principles, but those who summed up the experiences of their peers and adjusted them to solve domestic problems, among them Antal Palóczi. He prepared urban plans and proposals for […]

Re-Shaping Budapest: Large Housing Estates and their (Un)Planned Centers

The core of the theoretical reflection is the modern large housing estate as a spatial unit, its subdivision, and center. The comparative study presents Budapest’s 15 large housing estates (with more than 6000 dwellings) realized during the two 15-year mass housing programs between 1960 and 1990. That time, most of the urban land was publicly […]

The Beauty of the New Modern Life and Technology The Survival of Socialist Architecture in the Budapest City Centre

Based on the narrowing lists of three Budapest architectural guides (1980, 1997, 2014) of buildings completed 1945-1990, the paper intends to discover the reasons for their survival, changes or demolishing. It concentrates on the story of three office buildings built after 1960. The analysis proves that the two demolished buildings not only lost their tangible […]