Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Bertalan Árkay and Virgil Bierbauer (Borbíró) displayed their designs in the autumn of 1933. Plans for the “Arany Hill Stadium” generated lively response and pointed the direction the stadium-debate was to take for years. (Arany Hill as a possible site for the national stadium kept emerging until as late as, and even after, the construction work of the People’s Stadium had been begun.) The significance of the plan exceeded that of an issue concerning sports-architecture to affect, for all practical purposes, urban development at large. The design envisaged the north-western corner of Óbuda at the level of Aquincum, on Arany Hill and its foothills to the east as the site of the national stadium, whose construction would have involved the infrastrucÁrkay and Bierbauer’s stadium-design

tural development of the entire Óbuda region. The football and athletics stadium, meant to be cut into the side of the Arany Hill, would have had a capacity of 72,000 (or, if need be, 120,000) spectators. The facility would have been supplemented with an annex including an Olympic village, separate tennis and swimming stadia, two sports halls, a rowing track and a 45-acre gymnastics field that could be used as a wind-gliders’ airport.

The appearance of the Arany Hill design gave further inspiration to the community of architects, and

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