Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)
The world was shocked to see two of the tallest constructions of the world collapse on September n, 2001. Builders were not to be intimidated, though: new structures have been planned to stand in their stead. Human creativity faces the constant challenge of ever transcending the potentials in the appearance of new technologies and those hidden in existing ones. At present there are 62,000 high- rises and skyscrapers in the world and this number is constantly on the rise. The architectural technology, structural solutions and revolutionary growth in dimensions characterising America's skyscrapers (in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia) was of course known to the architects of Europe and Hungary, too. The circumstances and conditions were missing in the Old Country, particularly in Hungary, while in the meantime ever higher office and apartment blocks grew out of the earth, as if by magic, in America. Without the emergence of corporate cartels and groups of banks consolidating whole industries, the concentration of capital did not reach the stage where architectural monumentality was called for to express the unchallengeable superiority of a given business empire. Rabid speculation in real estate leading to the extreme shrinkage of construction sites in America also failed to happen here. Still, Hungary's architects in the first half of the 20th century regarded with unfeigned admiration the wave of skyscraper building on the far side of the Atlantic while travel books, films, and magazines made these buildings symbolic of the United States - and thus of freedom - to the population at large. Another influence here was made by Germany's "Hochhausfieber", too, but the architectural regulations of 1914 frustrated these towering aspirations by forbidding the erection of buildings above 25 metres. Regarded as an anarchistic symbol of a liberal urban policy by the conservative masters, the skyscraper was seen by radical young architects as a challenge of the future embodying modernity itself. That is why the architectural journal Tér é& Forma (Space and Form) carried a heading that featured two virtual skyscrapers of Budapest between the silhouettes of St. Stephen's Basilica and the Museum of Applied Arts... Our architects made virtuoso designs. One of these, coming from the drawing board of Sándor Skutetzky in 1912, was for a Newspaper Palace on the site where Corvin Department Store was built later. Of two entries submitted to a competition announced in 1926 for a building to stand on the site of the Gerbeaud building, one was made by the youngest scion, Bertalan, of the Árkay dynasty, while the 11
