Kiss Katalin: Industrial Monuments - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)
The sight of old relics of industrial architecture fills us with peculiar feelings. They are different from other buildings. They were not dwellings-they were scenes of transformation and rebirth. Raven-black coal, sweet- scented wood and swelling wheat were swallowed up in the stomachs of these factories. And here they went through mysterious processes. Their fragile bodies were branded, cut by saw or smashed by millstone, and at the exit lorries were already waiting for them. The factory had its own treasures and secrets shared only with some mute people with wrinkled faces and horny hands, who nowadays speak about the factory and about the times when both they and it were young. The clock of those people’s lives was imperceptibly guided by the turning-points of the factory’s life. As an old shipyard worker remembers: “When we brought over the machines from the flood...” Here we enter a marvellous, sensitive world, history itself filtered through the fates of many people. Whatever you build, outlives you. An abandoned industrial building, however, even if keeping something of the happier appearance of its earlier days, is like a dog which has lost its master. After a useful life spent in grand activity, the old factories now experience a long and painful agony. The buildings in the city centre are relatively fortunate, for they soon find a new master, as did the Castle Garden Pavilion or the Transformer Station in Markó utca. However, those farther out, like the Óbuda Shipyard, the Gas Works, or the Central Abattoir, can be saved only by means of some wonder. In today’s accelerated world many of us have to live to see things we have never expected before. The old mechanic has to scrap his still functioning machines, which he himself may have put together when the factory was founded. The industrial revolution was indeed the greatest turning-point of modern history. The old cities in an instant grew out their five-hundred-year-old walls, and their expansion is still continuing. At the end of the 19th century, Budapest become, with its 700,000 inhabitants, the tenth largest city of Europe, and a quarter of the country’s industrial production was concentrated here. Our great-grandfathers could walk all over the city in a few hours, while for us not even a week would be 5
