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

Office Blocks and Public Buildings

lithic reinforced-concrete roof. Wind pressures are absorbed by the two monolithic reinforced-concrete towers encasing the lift shafts and staircases.

The 24th, top, floor includes water tanks, the lifts' and the ventilation system’s engine rooms, and the front maintenance crane.

The impressive lobby is made distinctive by Gyula Hincz’s large glass window. The empty spaces on the ground floor have recently been converted into smaller units catering for the students' various needs. The Budapest Fire Department holds emergency drills at regular intervals in the building.

The SOTE tower block hosted the ist National Stair Running Competition for Fire-fighters on 16 August 2006. Competitors wearing full fire-fighting gear complete with a respiratory apparatus set out for the topmost floor at two-minute intervals. Winner First Lieutenant Gábor Csiszár ascended the 22 floors in 186 seconds.

"Copland Yard" - The Police Headquarters

No. 6 Teve utca, District XIII

Important considerations of selecting the site of the building were easy accessibility and rapid response. The slim tower of the police headquarters is a perfect complement to the twenty-story block of the Pensions Bureau. The combined floor space of the building amounts to 58,000 square metres. Its main mass is made up of the regular building of the Budapest Police Headquarters, an almost three-quarter-sector, 9-storey edifice supplemented by the 16-storey core, the section used by the National Police Headquarters. This sharing of premises is emblematic of coordinated planning and management. Housed in the building are two independent organisations, but some spaces are jointly used (the garages, the lobby, the auditorium, the mess, the boiler room, the engine room of the air conditioner, the transformer boxes and the telephone switchboard). The complex was designed by József Finta ("Lakóterv” Ltd. and, subsequently, the Finta S Partners Architect Studio Ltd.) between 1992 and 1994. The various subcontractors' work was coordinated by the Hungarian Builders Co. under the supervision of director László Felföldy. On a ca 10,500- square-metre ground space, a combined floor space of 62 thousand square metres has been built. This total is broken down according to the following functions:

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