2011/1

The emotional wounds caused by the flood disaster last year in Zsolca may never get healed. However, everyone living there could celebrate the Christmas of 2010 in a new house. This was partly owing to the generally selfless help of Hungarian architects. We should emphasize this now when the year of the election prioritizing political interests is over.

The realization of the European Cultural Capital Pécs 2010 project should not be assessed within one single scheme. On the one hand it could be evaluated in terms of judgements by culture-consuming citizens – this is where we should compare programmes, the created/sustaining values with costs and expenses…

Pécs has more than deserved its concert hall: although it could be the European Cultural Capital for just one year, the city remains one of the most important cultural centres of Hungary after 2010 as it has always been. The fact that this building could be built here makes musicians and audience cheer and jubilate.

This area of Lágymányos used to be a lake divided off by a dam on the Danube built to divert the stream. After landfilling it had not been suitable for development for a long time. at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the central building of the technical university as well as the ancillary structures were built after designs by Alajos Hauszmann and Samu Petz.

The new Main Street of the Inner City has its first section joining Szabadság Square at an interactive fountain. Visitors are welcome here by also one of the oldest protected historic building of the area – or more precisely its recomposed block – on the left, on the corner of Október 6. Street. With a past of more than two centuries, this house was originally built as…

The extension of the Baroque chapel in the heart of Brussels is the joint work of the Torino-based Studio Bruno and the Belgian SUM Project office. The conservation architect Andrea Bruno declared that the “Brigittines were already plural by name, now they are also plural by nature” – the driving concept of the design.

Launched before the change of the political system, the rehab project of Ferencváros is one of those that Budapest may be proud of. As a result of clever decisions, this ruinous and slumming area has been gradually facelifted for three decades now. These days the metamorphosis of Central Ferencváros has reached the next stage…

Housing Oxygen Wellness Centre, there is a new structure alongside with the recently facelifted Rácz baths. This area of Tabán has been redeveloped this way but without the „Grinzing-like”atmosphere of the past: instead it is home to a large number of services for new social layers with higher salaries. Businessmen are the target group of the VIP section of Rácz baths and…

There used to be manors in every significant village of the Káli Basin thus each of them had one or more economic unit of its own. These complexes were typically built on the outskirts of the villages although some of them were moved to a neighbourhood of residential buildings. László Vincze architect was fascinated by the beauties of the landscape and this meant…

Walking along the main street of Mád, a former market town of Hegyalja region one does hardly recognize at first sight the gables of the contemporary buildings of Royal Winery rising above the roofs of houses with historic atmosphere. However, they open up powerfully and impressively when we approach them across the narrow yard surrounded by…