Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

The Rebirth of styles - the stairs of Historicism

In the past twenty years the hall has often appeared in television footage as the setting of pitched political battles. Looking at the civic representatives, one should always recall the image of the sumptuous sets of steps whereby they ascended.

Wondrous stairs in the Ybl Palace

Designed by Miklós Ybl, the neo-Renaissance building of the First Domestic Savings Bank of Pest was opened in 1869 on a plot at what is now 12 Károlyi Mihály utca in the inner city. Beneath the corner tower its entrance and the central staircase of a unique spatial effect began to attract public attention before the construction was finished. On the ground floor the builders opened spaces for commercial and catering businesses, while the upper floors were designed to hold elegant haute-bourgeois apartments. Its extension in 1887 - which was later followed by innumerable modifications in later times - was constructed according to designs made by Ybl himself.

From the beginning of the last century the building housed the offices of the Budapest Waterworks until the company moved to its new headquarters built in Váci út in the 1980s. The construction of the second underground line damaged the building so seriously that its fate was all but sealed, but then, in 1998, it was bought by Lindner Budapest Ltd., who undertook to renovate it in an exemplary manner. Overseen by

■ Waltz in thej/bl Palace

36