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Architecture

Architecture in Budapest

Budapest set its monuments along the Danube and its grand public rooms behind them, built in the fifty years either side of 1900 when the city was a co-capital of an empire. Its newest architecture has gone into the city park.

• House of Hungarian Music

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  Completed 2022

  Sou Fujimoto

  A concert hall and museum in the city park, the most awarded of the recent buildings there. Fujimoto floated a thin perforated roof, punched with nearly a hundred holes for the trees to grow through, over walls of glass that dissolve the line between the park and the building. Gold leaf lines the underside of the roof. The roof does the work a facade usually does, Fujimoto's reading of a Hungarian park.

• Museum of Ethnography

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  Completed 2022

  Marcel Ferencz

  An ethnographic museum in the city park, built as a curved bridge of a building with a sunken plaza beneath its arch. Ferencz sank most of the galleries into the ground and planted the sloping roof, then wrapped the raised ends in a metal screen of half a million pixels drawn from the collection's folk patterns. The building is a park you can walk over. It puts the collection's motifs on the outside and buries the museum, a neat inversion for a national institution.

• Bálna

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  Completed 2013

  Kas Oosterhuis

  A shopping and culture centre on the Pest embankment, grafted onto a row of nineteenth-century customs warehouses. Oosterhuis threaded a glass-and-steel shell, curved like the back of a whale, out of the old brick halls and over the promenade, joining the two eras in one continuous surface. The name is the shape. It took years of legal dispute to finish and remains half-loved, the usual fate of a building that argues with its neighbours.

• Hungarian Parliament Building

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  Completed 1902

  Imre Steindl

  The seat of the National Assembly, stretched two hundred and sixty-eight metres along the Pest bank of the Danube. Steindl wrapped a symmetrical Gothic Revival exterior, bristling with pinnacles and modelled on Westminster, around a central dome that borrows from Renaissance Rome, and lined the interior in gold leaf. It was the largest building in Hungary when it opened and still is. Steindl went blind before it was finished and died weeks before the parliament first sat in it.

• Museum of Applied Arts

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  Completed 1896

  Ödön Lechner

  A decorative arts museum, and the building that founded a Hungarian national style. Lechner roofed it in glazed Zsolnay tiles in green and gold and shaped its forms from folk embroidery and the country's supposed eastern roots, over an iron-and-glass hall that owes as much to a railway shed as to a palace. The ornament is native; the engineering is modern. It was his argument that a young nation could have an architecture neither Viennese nor a copy of the past.