Ghetto Memorial on Klauzál Square

Architects: Levente Szabó, Balázs Biri, László Rátgéber
Text: György Szegő
Photos: Balázs Biri

The ghetto memorial in the centrally positioned square in District VII in Budapest was designed by Hetedik Műterem (Seventh Studio). It reflects in a 21st-century style on the tragic events of the last surviving ghetto in Europe, which was on the Pest side of the capital city, for the present and future generations, while at the same time it sensitively takes into account the special memorial customs that have survived in the culture of the victims since ancient times, ranging from the prohibition of depicting people to the typography of the texts. The designers’ network proposal both marks the borders of the former ghetto and establishes a central memorial site on Klauzál Square. Although invisible, the number symbol is a perceptible one. It is a cylindrical martyrs’ memorial on a 4m2 site. Behind the seemingly abstract square metres, the plan reveals further numbers: in the enclosure of the ghetto including 16 streets, a total of 40,000 persecuted people were crammed into the evacuated apartments of the 12,000 city-dwellers who lived there by December 1944, and 70,000 by January. The square soon became the graveyard of many of them. The upper surface of the memorial disk is irregularly spaced with 3,000 bronze plates, measuring 18×18 mm, with 4 mm thickness. The disc is inscribed in Hungarian, Hebrew and English, in a typography reminiscent of the typical forms of writing used in the wartime announcements back in those days.

Client: Municipality of Erzsébetváros
General planning: Hetedik Műterem
Architects: Levente Szabó, Balázs Biri, Anna Breuer, Borka Surján, Szabolcs Szilágyi
Graphics, typography: Ákos Polgárdi
Concrete works: VPI Beton
Realisation: Kőművészet Ltd.