Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)

The editor of this series commissioned me to put together a book on the modern architecture of Budapest in the interwar period. Isn't that a treat? After a two-volume topographical description and innumerable articles it should be child’s play to do a booklet on the subject for the general public, I thought. Well, it isn’t. No sooner had 1 sat down to it than a whole range of questions leaped at me. What criteria was 1 to use when selecting those two dozen works that can be surveyed within the confines of the given length? What approach was I to take-, objective or subjective, data-based or pictorial? And most importantly: would I be able to speak about buildings to make it all sound interesting? (That reminded me of a review called "The Architect Takes a Walk” written of my booklet on shop fronts. The piece that could be summed up like this: the author reveals everything about shop windows that is not worth knowing.) So 1 decided not to worry about whoever might pick up my book, whether it is to be read by a fellow expert, a layperson, a Hungarian compatriot or a foreign visitor. 1 would simply choose the buildings that I am fond of. These are to be the ones I like either because I once grew up with them, walked the streets among them, maybe had first-hand knowledge from their designers, or simply because 1 believe them to be architecturally remarkable enough to deserve special attention. 1 would try to write about them in a way that having put down my book the reader should feel like setting out to have a closer look at this or that particular building on the spot. And if there was no opportunity for them to do so, at least they should learn something of interest about the architectural history of the period, the professional issues it raised and, most importantly of all, form an impression of the life that was lived in the streets and squares of the city and among the walls of its buildings. 1 could not possible be an eyewitness but I am still convinced that the 1930s was as much of a heyday in the history of Budapest as the Gründerzeit at the turn of the century or the Art Nouveau periods had been. Maybe the reminders of this period are not as visible as those of some of the others: one has to travel to the outskirts or walk into hidden side-streets, perhaps climb the hills of Buda to have a glimpse of them, and sometimes a very vivid imagination - aided with archive photographs - is called for if one is to see a reconstructed or run-down building in all of its original splendour.

1 also set it to myself to show the great diversity of Budapest’s modern architecture, the multiplicity of the approaches, tastes and fashions that left their mark on the architectural environment that came into being in no more than fifteen years, as the period to be surveyed here is no more than that. True, the first begin5