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

Only a handful of buildings rise above the terrain-friendly texture of Budapest’s architecture. Of them some blend in with the landscape (the Elizabeth Lookout Tower), others are practical (church towers), others again are strictly necessary (smokestacks) and there are a few annoyingly unwieldy (the tower block in Alagút utca).

And how many plans have been proposed! What if they had all materialized? They include Hugó Gregersen's Manhattan-style high-rise in the place of St. Roch’s Hospital; Bernard Bocié and Antal Puhl’s 360-metre tall "Newstower”, a skyscraper to have been made of 8,500 tons of steel and topped with a spherical observation site; and the twenty-five storey, 78-metre tall Hotel Palatínus envisaged, in the 1970s, to stand on Margaret island between the Pioneers’ Stadium and the Sports Swimming Pool. It was between Petőfi Bridge and the southern Railway Bridge — which is paired with today's Lágymányos Bridge — where a 13-metre wide, covered footbridge was to have connected the Crystal Tower, a 150-metre structure with a floor space of 320 square metres on the Pest side, with the opposite bank of the Danube. But József Finta also imagined a skyscraper, one to stand near his Police Headquarters, a palatial building he had designed earlier. These ’’stillborn'’ ideas of architects were removed from the investors’ agendas as fast as they hrd been put on them. And idle questions beginning with ’’what if” are not a worthy of the historian’s — that is, the urban historian's - serious pursuit...

The history of Budapest's towers can be traced back to the 13th century. This is what King Béla IV (1235-70) had to say of the first towers raised in Buda after the Mongol Invasion as part of Hungary's first "priority project"; "Besides divers castles capable of defending the country, 1 have caused a castle to be built on the Pest mount fortified with sturdy towen and fitted with several dwelling places.” Louis the Great (1342-82) had his royal seat moved to Buda in 1346 after having his fortified palace built on the until-then empty southern plateau. Rising high above the complex was the István Tower or István Castle built by the monarch's brother Stephen. This peculiar, pinnacle-crowned, structure exemplifies the type known as Danube-valley castle tower. (The tower looks amazingly like the tower of St. Mary's Church in Krakow, Poland. This is due to the fact that Poland's Prince Sigismund purchased drafts and hired craftsmen during his 1500—02 stay in Buda for the construction of the Wawel, Krakow’s Renaissance palace.) Remnants of the 2.7-metre thick lower walls of the square tower are still extant.

Buda saw its first period of prosperity during the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387—1437) as the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor. That was when the multi5