Rescaling “Historic Budapest”: Paradigm Shifts in Urban Heritage within Hungarian Architectural Discourse of the 1960s

Abstract

Budapest encompasses several historic urban neighbourhoods that have each been designated “historic” at various times and via different mechanisms. The most recently designated historic centre is located on the left bank of the Danube, in Pest, which was largely (re)built in the late 19th century. Since the 1960s, urban heritage preservation has assumed a new dimension, necessitating a shift in scale in Europe and North America: Preservation efforts have expanded from solely protecting historic monuments to encompassing larger areas. The concept of the historic city centre in Pest evolved in tandem with European intellectual movements, while incorporating specific local elements. Hungary’s and Budapest’s “tumultuous history”, characterised by fractures from the Middle Ages onwards, has repeatedly led to the destruction of buildings representative of previous eras and an ensuing near-total absence of architectural heritage. This theme has been a recurring topic in architectural and urban planning journals since the 1930s. Consequently, urban heritage in Budapest has been described in the architectural journals as fragmented, conveyed through concepts such as “townscape”, “landscape”, and “urban structure”, which have vaguer boundaries or can even be considered as “transcendental”. This can be contrasted with Western European concepts centred around attributes such as antiquity, homogeneity, and architectural unity. In this context, the challenge of creating urban heritage was pursued through the construction of a spatial and temporal continuum. Concisely, the historicity of Pest’s city centre was developed and rendered intelligible by the architectural discourse through changes in scale. This chapter aims to identify the elements through which architectural discourse in the 1960s appropriated and applied new urban heritage paradigms to reinterpret Pest’s inner city, based on an analysis of architectural journals (Magyar Építőművészet, Műemlékvédelem, Városépítés, Településtudományi Közlemények, Építés- és Közlekedéstudományi Közlemények/Építés- Építészettudomány) between 1956 and 1973.