Armuth Miklós - Lőrinczi Zsuzsa (szerk.): A Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem Történeti Campusa (Budapest, 2023)
A Könyvtár épülete - The Library Building Gy. Balogh Ágnes
THE LIBRARY BUILDING 1 3 0 Samu Pecz was invited by Alajos Hauszmann to take part in the design work of the Technical Universityin 1905. Five buildingsare his works altogether, ofwhich the Library (Kö Building) is the most significant one. Although pressed for time, Pecz designed a fully modern library carefully functionally conceived by relying on his own achievements of research work a few years earlier as well as the experiences gained on his study trips abroad. He had been engaged in issues concerning the library project twice before that time though: first when designing the National Archives, in preparation for which he travelled extensively abroad, but which was finally built later than the Library of the University of Technology itself and fora second time, when he was invited to the jury for the design contest of the Library of Kolozsvár (today: Cluj Napoca, Romania), where he had the opportunity to discuss the tasks involved in details with the best Hungarian professionals. As a designer, Pecz had to respond to the storage needs of more than 80,000 volumes housed then in the building of the university on Múzeum Boulevard, whilst also calculating for the future expansion of the collection. The history of the Library of the University of Technology intertwines with that of the institutions preceding the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (such as the Institutum Geometricum, József Trade School, then Polytechnical School). The core collection was that of the library of the József Trade School inaugurated two years after the opening of the institution in 1846. Thus the library as an institution dates from 1848: on May 9th that year József Eötvös, then Minister of Culture, donated a five-volume book to the József Trade School. In 1854 the collection was moved from Pest to the Buda side, namely the Castle, where the two-room library was opened to students in 1869. In 1871 the József Polytechnical School was promoted to university status. This is when the library started to develop into a modern and large collection. After the József Technical University had been moved from Buda to Pest, the library found its home first in Nágel House, then in 1874 in Kerkápoly House [a rental property at No. 8 Csillag Street), and then in 1877 in another rented house, Schön berg House (No. 13 Kétnyúl Street). In the 1870s, when the university was still housed in various temporary buildings, the collection of the library significantly grew. On the completion of the university building on Múzeum Boulevard in 1882, which was designed by Imre Steindl, the collection found its deserved and worthy place on the mezzanine near the main entrance: here a reading hall with a seating capacity of several hundreds awaited students, whilst the teaching staff had its own reading hall equipped with a bookstore, cloak-room and modern air-heating.
