Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)
other had been drawn up by Hugó Gregersen. Betraying the influence of modern German architecture, Árkay’s office building would have been centred on a block rising 60 metres above Vörösmarty tér. Gregersen's work featured a style that was becoming passé in America at the time. He was to submit to various later competitions a host of further surprising designs. One of these was for a skyscraper to stand on the site of St. Roch's Hospital or on the comer of Király utca and Károly körűt to replace the Orczy House, which was awaiting demolition. Plans for a new City Hall in the shape of a tower block kept architects busy for decades: Aladár Münnich and Hugó Pál envisaged a thirteen-storey edifice, while Pál Forgó had bold plans for the replacement of the historic building of the old hall with a new, 25-30 floor edifice for the area whose vicissitudinous history has not ended to this day. Péter Kaffka, an architect in the employ of the Board of Public Works, designed a new city centre comprising a peculiar group of skyscrapers in 1929 to rise on the spot of today's Erzsébet tér "Pit": with the arrangement of these buildings Kaffka meant to create a more attractive visual environment for the important buildings already standing in the vicinity. It was for the same area in the nearby Károly körút that Gedeon Gerlóczy designed his 21-storey, 80-metre tall skyscraper. Other locations favoured by the architects were the two banks of the Danube. In the university campus planned for the Lágymányos area, in the extended axis of Petőfi Bridge, was to be raised, to plans by Móric Pogány (1928-29), the 58-metre tall "Tower of Learning", while Jenő Lechner envisaged his 130-metre tall "Tower of Hungary’s History" to stand on the Pest-side bank. Where a series of rather uneven-looking buildings stand today, Lechner would have had a row of arcaded blocks of a uniform height with a tower block in the centre whose ten floors would have represented the ten centuries of Hungary's history. This would have been topped with the Chapel of Hungary's Credo and an observation terrace. Eventually, the only, low-scale, skyscraper of Budapest inspired by American models actually to be built was the 0T1 (National Social Security) Palace, completed by 1930. After that the Great Depression distracted all attention from the "domestication” of skyscrapers, the restructuring of Budapest's urban layout inherited from the Millenary period at the turn of the century and the transformation of the inner districts into a real "downtown” area. Plans for a New City Hall also fell through. The competition announced in 1939 was won by Róbert K. Kertész and Károly Weichtinger's entry for a huge, tapering 12
