On Budapest’s 150th birthday, we take a look at some of the non-realised architectural visions of the capital’s architectural design in the period of the past 150 years. What would the Danube Embankment look like with high-rise buildings? What would a French-built skyscraper look like next to the former Budapest Sports Hall, which was situated at the place where currently Budapest Arena is located? What was the vision of the capital’s metro lines like in the 1950s? What would the world’s largest synagogue situated in Budapest’s Újlipótváros district look like?
With the help of over 170 thought-provoking plans, maquettes, photos and videos, the exhibition entitled “Never Realised Buildings in Budapest” offers an intriguing perspective of what the Hungarian capital might have looked like if history took another course. Although none of the plans presented in the scope of this exhibition were ever realised, they are not in fact useless even today: these plans accurately reflect those social, cultural and economic conditions, political opportunities of manoeuvring and architectural qualities that characterised their time.
Selecting mainly from the Hungarian Museum of Architecture and Monument Protection Documentation Center’s own collection (curator: Dániel Kovács), this exhibition, among other works, presents the following designs: the utopian visions of Gyula Tálos, a moving railway station by Mária Istvánffy, plans of skyscrapers by Hugó Gregersen, and the beautiful drawings of the Regnum Marianum monument (which commemorates a Catholic church that was torn down in the Communist era to give way to a statue of Stalin) by the recently deceased Tamás Nagy.