Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)
Suggesting the changes in the state of tower-related affairs prevailing in 18th century Pest is L. F. Rosenfelt’s sepia print made in 1728 and kept in the military archives of Vienna. Rising on the Danube bank, with as yet a single tower, is the Inner City Parish Church. In the place of today’s City Hall aspired to the skies the longest-surviving mosque and its tall minaret. There was another mosque and its slim minaret where today's church in Ferenciek tere stands. Behind the Inner City Parish Church stood the angular building of the Town Hall with its slender turret. In the south of the city were the church and cloister of the Pauline and Dominican orders. Another drawing made by Rosenfelt in the same year provides an authentic view of Buda. Identifiable in it is the tower of the Carmelite Church (now the Castle Theatre), the small turret of the former Town Hall of Buda (today's Collegium Budapest), the tower of Our Lady's Church, and that of the Franciscan Church (in today's Kapisztrán tér). Easily made out in the Víziváros (Water Town) district is the Capuchin Church in today's Fő utca, and there is the Water Town Parish Church, the predecessor of St. Anne's Church, together with the former Franciscan Church in the north of today’s Batthyány tér. A peculiar feature of the picture is the huge dome and slim minaret of the saliter, or salt mosque standing in the vicinity of today's Király Baths. It is not by chance that the progress of human history has been marked by skyward reaching structures from the Tower of Babel to the Cathedral of Cologne. The more modest man-made elevations were not built for aesthetic reasons, but for the purposes of spotting fires or approaching enemy forces in time. It is not for nothing that church towers are described as reaching for the sky: it is the Saviour above to whom medieval man wanted to rise. That spatially economical structure of the 19th century American metropolis, the skyscraper, was originally designed for the exclusive purpose of housing offices and only later to serve as residential buildings. Equipped with lifts and self-contained water-supply systems (essential from a fire-safety point of view, also), these steel-frame buildings were raised by Native American workers unafraid of heights at literally breakneck speed, using special technologies. For quite some time it was pondered how to provide these buildings with attractive faqades. The introduction of aluminium as a structural material together with a more daring employment of glass solved that problem, too. The best-known skyscrapers 9
