Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)

facades of the buildings in general. It is true that a shopfront added to a building afterwards is a self-contained structure, whose contrast with the architecture of the building can hardly be resolved. But it is a question whether there is more to be gained than lost if the layers added to the bases of the buildings afterwards are peeled off. József Szirmai, a prominent architect and theoretician of shopfront design, believed that the “lower storeys of buildings are part of the life pulsing through a city. The more noticeably the shopfronts built into them differ from the boring residential sections above and the more emphatically they assert themselves, the better they serve their purpose and the more they embellish the streets.”

Historical photos prove that the eclectic wooden shopfronts really made the previously uniform but somewhat monotonous cityscape lively and spectacular. It is difficult to reconstruct their former beauty from their present state

Cast-iron bar used to prop up the awnings at 75 Király citca, VII

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