A műemlékek sokszínűsége (A 28. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1998 Eger, 1998)

Előadások / Presentations - ROMÁN András: Historic towns as monuments

Medieval Paris, beautiful and homogeneous Old Pest was demolished for the sake of Elisabeth bridge and the new city centre. Only the inner city parish church was considered an asset, not even the Town Hall. The destruction of Buda's Tabán area, which took place already this century, not to mention Óbuda, shows how long this trend went on. The definition and protection of sites of monuments, as provided for in the Venice Charter, were a great step forward. They allowed the safeguarding and complex renovation, internationally referred to mostly as rehabilitation, of more or less intact one-time town centres. In our country, sites of monuments were designated (nota bene: partly before the Charter was adopted) and the rehabilitation of some of these, namely Buda and Sopron, started. In France, under Lex Malraux, areas to be protected (secteurs sauvegardés) were demarcated in a quick development. Their size largely exceeded that of our sites of monuments. Their rehabilitation was carried out just as quickly as their demarcation. The notion of „úrban setting" referred to in the Venice Charter goes, however, beyond the protection of historic town centres. It perfectly embraces the site of avenue Andrássy and Heroes' square in Budapest, an outstanding ensemble of the architecture of historiclsm. I also rank among these settings the marvellous baroque ensemble of Stanislas square in Nancy, which has little to do with the other parts of the town, as well as two early housing estates in Budapest: Wekerle and, dating from twenty years later, Napraforgó street. However significant it was, the safeguarding of urban sites implied great threats to the towns. Because the limits to these sites, provided for in deliberations may, at most, push demolitions further away from the centres but not prevent them. On the contrary, the boundaries suggest that anything located beyond them has no value and, therefore, needs no protection. The sad history of Veszprém and Székesfehérvár and, to a certain extent, of Győr among the Hungarian towns is a good illustration of this. Protected sites, namely the historic centres of the above towns, have been reduced to inclusions in the transformed urban tissue. The logical, hardly perceivable transition from one period to the other, from one quarter to the other, which is always characteristic of grown towns, and which was characteristic of the above ones as well, was lost. The town was, in a way, broken into a historic and a new part. And that would be a problem even if the new part was not so bleak as it is in the above-mentioned cases. This is the ambiguity and these are the threats the Charter for Historic Towns is intended to solve by considering that towns as such are historic monuments. Towns, most of which have developed gradually in time and space, with ups and downs maybe, but no swift changes ever. The rare exceptions here include Szeged, destroyed by the floods and rebuilt with a new structure, or towns destroyed in the Second World War, like Warsaw, Coventry or Dresden, each of which gave a different answer to the question of how to rebuild. But luckily, these are exceptions. The continuous development of Pest was not interrupted by the 1838 floods, nor was that of London interrupted by the 1666 fire. Safeguarding a particular site or area implies, along with its many advantages, discriminating in favour of it and denying spatial and timely continuity, although continuity is a major feature of towns. Towns do have different quarters, but the boundaries between them are seldom sharp. The historic centre of Mexico City has nothing to do, for instance, with the unfortunately equally huge shantytown around the metropolis, but there is a whole range of intermediates in between. The character changes are gradual, almost unnoticeable. The recognition of towns as monuments themselves amounts to an integration of towns as logical entities rather than any discrimination between their various parts. And here we have to take another very important aspect into account. Towns are the most complex among monuments, not only for their spatial dimension and size but also for a specific feature only urban sites may share with them, namely that no town may exist without population. Towns are technical, architectural works with a constant human presence. The presence of people who live in communities, societies, have traditions,