Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)
Some special Towers
The unique complex is one of the most-frequented tourist sights of Budapest. The rich collection held in the Museum of Agriculture nearby also attracts many visitors, and many a young couple choose to be united in matrimony at the altar of the Benedictine Chapel here. In terms of tower per building, Ignác Alpár's work is an indisputable winner in Budapest with its innumerable towers, spires, belfries and turrets. Try to count them all! The control tower of Ferihegy Airport The modernisation and capacity-upgrading of Ferihegy Airport was long overdue by the 1970s. In 1977, the company Uvaterv started work on the designs, providing its employees with a major challenge. Although the capital construction was a priority government project, its pace had to be adjusted to the potentials of the socialist economy. Only half of the passenger terminal at Ferihegy 2 was completed as envisaged, and the tower was not built between two runways either, but at a distance of no more than 500 metres from the new runway. A major consideration of selecting its location was the position of the site at one of the highest natural elevations of the airport, and it was at a focal point of the traffic, too. The height of the tower was determined by requirements of visibility and potential enlargement. The size of the individual storeys was adjusted to the anticipated floor-space requirements of the main hall of the control centre (270 square metres with an inside height of 6.3 metres). The tower stands on two reinforced-concrete pylons, which are anchored to a seventy-centimetre thick sheet of reinforced concrete. The floors were suspended between the pylons, and the box of the control centre has a steel structure. Niches where the storeys to be built in the second phase of the construction could be locked were sunk into the pylons already in the first phase. The power cables for the technical equipment and the communications cables, too, run in shafts inside the pylons and between the dual floors of the storeys. The pylons contain the small staircases and lift shafts, too. The most challenging aspect of designing the structure was the installation of the ground control radar, which rotates at the rate of sixty turns per minute, causing significant dynamic stress. A thick reinforced-concrete sheet was placed above the control centre for the vibration-free anchoring of the radar. This is protected from the greatest expectable wind stresses by a hollow plastic sphere 78
