Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Converters and substations

Constructions to be used by the electric power industry demanded a highly rational approach from the designers, and yet the substation built at the corner of the Aquincum garden of ancient ruins in 1932 on Szentendrei út (photo on Page 34) looks more like a Roman palace than anything else. The neo-Classical building is the work of Dénes Györgyi and Ernő Román. The substations built at the corner of Attila út—Bugát utca (1939) and on Soroksári út (1942-47) were also designed by Dénes Györgyi.

The converter house at 30-32 Kárpát utca was built in 1930 to designs by Géza Rusznyák. Virgil Borbíró (Bierbauer) made two separate designs for the City Park station as after the first version was approved in 1928 the conception of power distribution was altered, which called for the construction of a larger building. A curious feature of the building at 159-161 Hungária körűt is the placement of two prismlike corner turrets, and the glass-walled staircase projecting in a semi-circular shape from the rear facade. Also designed by Borbíró, the substation in Simor (today’s Vajda Péter) utca was built in two phases between 1934 and 1941. Borbíró made the designs of the substation in Gerlóczy utca (photo on Page 35), too, which is now used by the Merlin Theatre, an arts centre instrumental in the birth of several by now world-famous troupes in the course of its twenty-year history.

■ Skin-membrane, 2009 by the Természetes Vészek Collective (Collective oh Natural Disasters). The independent theatre oh international fame has used its performances to test the limits oh the stage and the receptiveness oh the audiences

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