A nice provocation, rich in sentiment**
Can we find anything in common in the almost continuous changes to Buda Castle, other than that it is destroyed again and again, and rebuilt again and again? We have selected three fundamental principles (processes that have remained permanent during change) from the history of the Castle, which have determined the architectural essence of our proposal:
Every rebuilding following destruction kept something from the previous era. Sometimes merely ruins, sometimes the old was to all extents and purposes hidden inside the newly-constructed buildings. Buda Castle is a veritable treasure trove of layers of different architectural periods.
The proportions of the houses in the Castle changed drastically. It is natural that in the course of reconstruction the distribution of plots and the height of buildings changes, and that buildings with new functions are built. But at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the twentieth, this natural course of events went down some unusual paths. Another common characteristic is that, of the new buildings that changed the fundaments of the Castle's system of proportions, almost all are the result of plots being merged. This unusual process initially even ignored heights of buildings (eaves, ridges); later, accommodating to the height of existing buildings became a statutory requirement. Yet the merging of plots led to the birth of "dachshund houses" which had trouble fitting in with existing proportions. (A refreshing exception to this was the construction of the set of buildings to fill the gap in Arpad Toth Avenue, a complex which was way ahead of its time.)
The real loss in the overall picture of Buda Castle as it rose up again and again is that the number of towers constantly decreased. The changing silhouette of the Castle, with the disappearance of these towers, is a real exception to the general rule that architecture from different periods always survived.
Stratified architecture
One of the most important characteristics of Buda Castle is the architecture of different eras being layered one on top of another. Looking at the remaining sections of the former National Defence Headquarters on Disz Square from this perspective, we consider them not as remnants that cannot be built upon or as the building blocks of facadism, but as a unified whole. As a construction which is one of the independent units of the new complex of buildings to be built. This does not of course mean that no reconstruction will take place, but it does mean that any changes made will be in line with this model-like guiding principle. The new parts of the complex will be laid on top of the ruins in newer and newer layers, encircling them, supplementing them, and, not least, giving them new meaning.
Old-new system of proportions
Throughout the long history of Buda Castle, the area around Disz Square has always been a kind of interim zone between the residential buildings and the Royal Palace. For this reason, we thought ourselves entitled freely to decide which of the Castle's characteristic systems of proportions and scale we would choose: the smaller, more articulated proportions of the residential area, or the more generous patterns of the palatial district. We chose the former, for two reasons.
As we mentioned in the introduction, the original layout of the residential houses is beginning to disappear. So we did not simply follow the current system of scale in the residential part of the Castle: our intention was to revive a much earlier historical system of proportions.
We did not envisage the planning task to involve a single building, but rather a group of buildings, the elements of which would imitate the characteristics of the district in days of old. Our proposals, that is, were not for a "building", but for a "city within a city". We should note that there was a time when a "block" of small houses stood on this site: we could have chosen to formulate our basic goal so as simply to reconstruct this block. But we went much further. For we planned not only for the reconstruction of the houses as a whole, but for the strange network of alleyways, the wider pedestrian streets that intersect them, and we created a little square that is nicely embedded into the texture of the surroundings. Stepping out from the alleys into the square, we stand at the foot of the tower looming above us. We tried to make it possible to experience again that which was for centuries a part of life for the city's residents, but which disappeared almost without trace in the great urban reconstructions at the end of the nineteenth century. The other reason we decided to take the redefinition of the residential district as one of our basic planning principles is the Castle Theatre building on the east side of Szinhaz utca, a monastery dissolved by Joseph II and redesigned for secular use by Farkas Kempelen. We felt that we should not create a street in the Castle that is enclosed on both sides by a long, relatively low continuous facade. Fortunately the Castle has eluded anything like this until now, not to mention that such streets delineated by walls are ugly and boring.
The tower's message
A magically absurd activity architects can sometimes partake in is the building of towers. Without going into a lengthy historical discussion and analysis of this, suffice to say that, if we conjure up an old representation of Buda Castle, we can feel how much the towers are missing from today's overall picture. But this absence did not prompt us to identify the locations of the disappeared towers and reconstruct them. In the previous part we alluded to the fact that during planning we "modelled" much more than rebuilt. This is precisely why the tower is not only an architectural element, but the representation of our project's message. Just as the renovation of the tower of Saint Matthias Church, the restoration of the Magdolna tower as a listed monument, the complete rebuilding of the dome of the Royal Palace, or the redefinition of the Michael tower when the Hilton hotel was reconstructed were all bearers of quite distinct messages.
The Bio-tower we have designed is a message from the present to the future. It transgresses the boundaries of modelling the past, even if, in doing so, it creates an element in the collection of buildings in Buda Castle that jars with that legacy. The essence of what we have to say is not to be found in the tower's use of materials, design, or aesthetic, but in the fact that it is a bearer of nature, of the biosphere. The city's texture always included confined (closed) crafted oases, as if symbolizing the garden in Paradise. Together, the hanging gardens rising above the city symbolically lift the trees, bushes and flowers out of the city's texture. Visitors to the Bio-tower see the whole city from its terraces. But in their perception nature is every bit as present as for those who look at the tower from afar. Alongside a symbolic exhibition of the biosphere - again calling upon the technique of modelling for assistance - we recreate the cloister garden of old. The upstairs cloister of the proposed museum will embrace the oasis of the peripatetic person of the future.
Translated by David Robert Evans.
* Description of the proposal for the building of the former National Defence Headquarters at 17 Disz square in Buda Castle. Further architectural work: Zsuzsy Novak and Eva Joo.
** Extract from the jury's evaluation.