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.