ABSTRACT
An American journalist visited Budapest in 1892. Impressed by the city’s newness and growth, he declared that Budapest had ‘blossomed out of the primitive and forlorn conditions into the full magnificence of a splendidly appointed modern metropolis’. Few other cities could be found, he added, ‘whose development has been kept so well in hand by the authorities, and has been so symmetrical and scientific from the point of view of approved city-making’. The result was nothing less than ‘a fit capital for an ambitious young state’ (Shaw, 1892, pp. 163, 169). This was all journalistic hyperbole, yet it hints at several factors that make Budapest a fascinating case study of modern urban planning and architecture. First, few nineteenth-century cities grew as rapidly as Budapest, as could be measured in its surging population, striking physical expansion, bold new representative structures, and sudden accretion of political power. Second, the transformation of Budapest was guided by highly interventionist state and local authorities, who used institutions such as the Metropolitan Board of Public Works to oversee the development of transportation, infrastructure, and building codes. Last, to an extent rarely seen elsewhere, nationalism helped define urban needs and architectural idioms – the fitful search around 1900 for an authentic Hungarian architectural language is but one aspect of this dynamic.
