Hungary | Michael Hoffman Photography

Posted

February 25, 2019

Perspectives on a Parliament and a Television Tower

Central Europe is particularly rich in famous landmarks. Two of my favorite structures in this region are the Parliamentary Building in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, and the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. From an architectural perspective, these two buildings have little in common. While the Hungarian Parliament is a neo-gothic administrative building, grandeur in size and very unusual for a gothic building equipped with a beautiful red coppola, the TV Tower in Berlin was meant to showcase socialist architecture and technology and was easily seen from Western Berlin. As different as these buildings are, they both were planned as and turned, in fact, out to be landmarks of their respective hometowns – though in another way than the architects envisioned. Germany today is reunited again; many structures from socialist times were torn down, and the TV tower became a signature building of the reunited city and a piece of historic futurism. The parliamentary building in Budapest, on the other hand, is the legislative building of the independent republic of Hungary today, which emerged from the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I.

Posted

May 17, 2016

Györ: Portrait of a Baroque City

Györ is a Hungarian city with a population of 130.000 inhabitants in the west of the country. Most of the architecture dates back to the Habsburg times and reflects the trendy style of Baroque in the region (mainly in the 18th century).

Posted

October 26, 2013

Hungary 2013 Impressions

The great thing about living in Vienna is nothing is really far away, and you are abroad quickly. Central Eastern Europe and Southern Eastern Europe (the Balkans, in other words) are incredibly close. Though strangely, Austrians seldom go East (except for plastic surgeries and dentists), there is still a mental barrier I never fully understood. In the Austrian mindset, the Czech Republic is still in the East, and Krakow, Poland, seems indefinitely far away, though, in reality, it is much closer to Vienna than the Westernmost city in Austria, Bregenz. Naturally, this snooty attitude is viewed with suspicion by our neighbors. However, much is changing, and the younger generation is beginning to embrace the charm of the East.

Incredibly close to Vienna, both in geographic and cultural terms, is the capital of Hungary, Budapest. Like Vienna, it had its heydays around 1900 in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and you still see it. In architectural terms, the two cities are closely related; there are a lot of baroque churches, large areas of residential buildings from the founding period, and some beautiful Jugendstil façades. If you look on the map and see the districts (in both cases, 23.) and names of bridges and boroughs, you feel like you have landed in a mirror universe. However, there are some differences. Budapest still has maintained its old railway stations (pictures 1, 3, 5 in the background and 7), which disappeared from Vienna and were replaced by shopping-service hybrids in the vain of the consumerist society. Also, the city is much closer to the Danube than Vienna, having a pleasant city hill on the Buda site, making it very similar to Prague in structure. Hungarians are very patriotic; you see a lot of monuments everywhere. A vital role in their self-view is the role of a nomad’s heritage and horse riding culture. This heritage links closely to the country’s geographic conditions as a vast lowland (pictures 2 and 5). Hungary is definitely worth a visit, especially for young travelers, being also very affordable at the moment.