Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
16 Alkotmány ütca, district V This building was erected at the same time as the majority of the mansions in today’s Alkotmány utca, about a decade before the turn of the century. The rapid development of this neighbourhood of Lipótváros (Leopold Town) began with the order for demolition of the infamous Újépület (New Building) military barracks, but by the time this symbolic act occurred, its surroundings had already been built on. The “boulevardification” of Váci körút (today part of it called Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út) and the readjustment of the neighbouring sidestreets had been going orr since the seventies. In contemporary parlance the term “boulevardification” referred to structural reconstruction on a grand scale - the installation of broad, tree-lined avenues, tasteful buildings of a high standard of craftsmanship with shops on their ground floors behind huge, alluring shop windows, or with restaurants and cafés. It took less than two decades to achieve the grandiose goals set by the Board of Public Works in relation to the area stretching between Andrássy út, a street itself still under construction, and the brand new Nyugati (Western) Station and, as part of the same programme, for Alkotmány utca to be created in the shape known to us today, as one of the most impressive sections of the capital. The same epoch is also known as a period of rebirth as regards Hungarian journalism whose rapid development and dynamism is comparable to what was going on in America - papers with daily circulation figures reaching a hundred thousand, an enormous public interest in current news, and the elevation of the journalist to a position of real power, arguably for the first time in the history of Hungary’s press. The brotherhood of journalists was able to look after its own interests, for example through the founding and maintenance of prosperous welfare and charitable associations. In 1889, the Hungarian Journalists’ Retirement Fund commissioned Zsigmond Quittner to prepare designs for a luxury apartment house. The architect subordinated all practical considerations of structural design to one obvious requirement - that of making an impression. The mansion block, set in a trapezoid shape, is closed by the exclamation mark of a tower topped with a huge dome. 22
