Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)

Office Blocks and Public Buildings

cubic metres was created. With its cylindrical corner turret, its rustic stone base- course, its redbrick stripes arranged in a curious vertical pattern, and its Hungarian-style sgraffiti, the neo-Eclectic building resembles a medieval castle. The bastion-like turret, which hides one of the lift engines, cannot be overlooked even at a distance; it also softens up the sharp edge of the Várfok utca corner. Many of its contemporaneous critics expressed doubts about the building's external appearance, but by now the complex has become a familiar landmark as it provides a westerly closure to the chaotic Moszkva tér.

Together with Róbert Nádler's glass-mosaic forming a coat of arms, Jenő Bory's artwork "Globe" set up on the corner of the building fell victim to the siege of Buda at the end of World War II. During rubble clearance operations, 3-400 lor- rysful of debris was dumped in the nearby Vérmező. The reorganized head office could not restart work before 1947 in the reconstructed building.

Established in 1885—90, the Postal Museum exhibited a collection of its holdings in the turret. The battlemented turret today functions as the base of an aerial mast. With a small balcony circling it, the steel mast erected in the turret's axis raises dozens of telecommunications and data-transfer aerials to the sky. There are rumours that the Hungarian Post intends to sell the building soon.

■ The Postal Palace

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