On the Design of Lehel Hall
“I used to wonder at those English or French people who dream of growing up in Florence, surrounded by the original statues, buildings and paintings of their studies… For myself, a citizen of eclectic Budapest, many things I encountered on my journeys in European cities were already intimately familiar. A statue of a slave in a museum would recall an Atlas figure supporting a Budapest balcony, the proportions of a palatial renaissance fortress would replicate the registry office on the city’s central boulevard. This may seem odd, given that the former are pillars of human culture, the latter mere competent replicas, transcriptions, or, perhaps, translations. Then again, Rákóczi never lived on Rákóczi Road but it still bears his name.* For me the translations are the originals: they were known to me before the originals, even if others find the museum statues more original. If you look very closely at that slave in the Louvre, it really does resemble my Atlas …” (László Rajk, Eclectics, Translated Originality, 2000).
Strata
Since Schliemann we know that civilisations, cultures, cities and buildings are layered on top of each other. The only matter open to debate is which stratum is the Trojan – the original. New layers appear above the old racetrack on the Piazza Navona. They build upon the foundations of an ancient christian cathedral or the walls of a gothic church, or they simply accumulate in front of an entire building. Ever newer layers dress up our cities, houses and apartments, and, not least, ourselves.
Emergence
New strata do not entirely conceal the old. The outlines of the racetrack can be traced on the Roman square. The old shows up below, above, beside or through the new. As time passes, the old may come to seem more valuable after all and a new layer will be peeled away. But a newer one will always emerge.
Mercury
Mercury-Hermes is the antique guardian of thieves (and, nota bene, merchants). He could well be the protector of architects too, as architects have always been thieves of a sort. Or, to put it more subtly, they have always followed, copied or mixed different styles. Sometimes they would be so bold as to remove components from existing buildings and reuse them according to their original functions. In this way, the column of a pagan temple is made into the founding buttress of a christian shrine, or a counterreformation style forms the root of atheist Stalin-baroque. Later the constructivist principle of social realism served as a basis for contemporary postmodern, or national conservative, architecture.
Gutenberg
Anything at all can be described by means of a limited set of components, provided that the components do not themselves carry semantic meaning. Take the alphabet: individual letters cannot be interpreted, but, although limited in number, in combination they can describe anything. The clearest example of this Gutenberg principle of the fragment is a brick, which has no meaning in itself but can serve to build both sacred and profane buildings alike. The same goes for the components of a building: when deprived of their original semantic meaning, even if a new meaning is vested in them, they are reused or recycled without their original meaning, either in their physical reality or symbolically.
In this way, small folkloric details become architectural decorations, magnified a hundred-fold; a sacred space becomes a secular haunt; an enormous edifice signifying power is transformed into a cultural centre, or a lively town into a lively, but uninhabited, tourist spectacle.
Incorporation
Architecture eats its young. What was a town once upon a time is a mere town centre today, long annexed by cannibalistic urban expansion. The original, however, still stands. Bulwarks end up as boulevards, courtyards take on glass roofs, thus moving indoors; a structure swallows up the memorial it is built to house; an old facade gets a new lease of life framed within a larger newer one.
Parasite
Architecture is parasitic – it settles on already existing formations. The Via Appia still functions as a road, old town structures remain unchanged – indeed, the new towns are the continuations of the old. Tiny hovels were built into the mega-structure of the Marcus Aurelius Theatre, luxury penthouses or attics sit astride scruffy old buildings, and utopianists still dream of family homes built into the structural skeletons of skyscrapers.
Addition
In Venice, houses are numbered according to when they were built: number 15 turns up right next to 228. This system reflects the incremental approach; it is faithful to the very essence of town development. The development of most churches follows a similar pattern: additional chapels and aisles are built against existing ones. The concept is true for all sorts of architectural additions in the form of vertical or horizontal extensions.
Gordian
Ever since Baron Haussmann, a popular urban gesture has been to hack a new structure into an already existing town formation. In some cases entire town systems are built like this (Bucharest), in others a crucial cut is necessary to untangle a city’s clotted traffic (think Broadway, Diagonal, or the Andrássy Boulevard in Budapest). Arcades, underground car parks, or atriums are similarly inserted into existing structures.
Palenque
The Maya ruins of Palenque, ensconced in ancient rainforest, were “liberated” by their new owner by simply setting fire to the jungle. The fire entirely destroyed the beautiful and colourful geometric plaster designs with which the pyramids and buildings had been covered, preserved by nature for centuries. Elsewhere, inhuman and artificial cities have been humanised by trees and plants, entwining them over decades; gardens – whether on a roof or a terrace, or in a courtyard – represent the mystery of our expulsion, and the trees in the courtyards of Pest have slowly become symbols of the city.
Eskimo
For Eskimos, the one true partner in design is Time. Timing is crucial in determining when to start building igloos, and their final dissolution is even more at the mercy of Time. Together, Eskimos and Time devised planned disappearance. Dissolution is also present, although not consciously, in the aesthetics of architecture. Few can dislike the beauty of the sun-worn walls of Tuscany, or the touch and personalised patina of objects shaped by the passage of time and use. We accept that whitewashed walls are white for a year only, but still we repaint them yearly – this too is a symptom of planned dissolution. Disappearance and time are on our side: instead of resisting them we can accept their peculiar aesthetics and let them be our co-designers.
Aladdin
Aladdin could see the Genie only if he tried. But, once out of the bottle, the Genie could achieve terrible mischief if no one paid attention. Invisible structures occupy and determine a growing area of our cities, apartments and even our own bodies. These systems have created an entire virtual universe, which we must respect, use, and cooperate with, just like Aladdin.
Bricolage
Although the concepts described above pertain to well-known persons or cities, all these methods can be said to have emerged from an architectureless architecture. They are continuously produced and created by practice and common sense. Architects tend to believe they have an irrefutable and unquestionable brilliance. They should also be aware of the enormous power and peculiar aesthetics of processes which run their own courses. Entire cities have been and are built without the input of architects. The products of spontaneous architecture can be detected at first glance, and not necessarily because they are ugly. It would be hard to deny that spontaneously constructed balconies, loggias, backyard tool-sheds or hovels have their own peculiar aesthetics. And people should not be barred from, but rather assisted in, fulfilling their desire to shape their immediate surroundings in their own image.
Lehel
Next to an aged road (Váci Road), there is an old cemetery which, at the end of the 19th Century, closed to make way, along the railtracks leading to Nyugati (Western) Station, for weapons factories and storehouses, the Arsenal (reflected in the street names Gunpowder and Artillery), and for the city’s biggest market: Lehel. The development of this market over a hundred odd years reflects the changes of city life. First, livestock trading was ended and the Church of Saint Margaret,* designed by Möller to replicate the Zsambék church ruins, sprung up in its place. After the war, the “Labourer’s Houses” were built on this spot, and when the nearby live poultry market was shut down, Kassák Lajos Street was extended in its place (formerly Fót Road, this street was, until the 1960s, surfaced with tarmac). With the construction of the third underground railway line, a new road was added behind the apse of the Church, to connect Váci Road with Lehel Road – with the result that travelling circuses could no longer erect their tents on the territory. The small hill behind the church, where local children would take their toboggans in the winter, also disappeared. By the end of the 1980s, the market had achieved its current shape, its internal working order, its alley systems and spontaneous centrally planned structure, all built beside and on top of each other.
Lehel Hall - The Fishwife’s Ship
With an eye to stratified architecture, the internal working order and its circulatory system (now on multiple levels) must remain, since, like the dimensions of the retailing outlets – the fundamental elements of the market hall, so to speak – they have been tried and tested. Thus a new layer appears above the old one, although the latter clearly shines through the former. An old market stall will remain at the epicentre of the new hall. With its interior entirely renovated, it will nevertheless reflect the original precisely. Several layers rush outwards from this pseudo-reconstruction, as though from the centre of the new hall. The pavilion is ensconced in its 1960s casing, all of which is incorporated into the steel-framed industrial revolution-era vault, and surrounded in turn by the reinforced concrete building of the modern period. The outer layer is of postmodern inspiration: large pillars (tree-trunks) support an enormous plant-holder (crown), in memory of the perished sycamores of Kassák Lajos and Váci Roads; an assembly of colourful constructivist and deconstructivist structural elements are suspended in-between, playfully echoing one another.
Smaller, more human, details will be added by retailers and shopkeepers themselves, with minimal guidance. These will be exclusively technical – the internal aesthetics of the hall will thus be fundamentally influenced by yet another stratum of spontaneity.
The building is colourful and playful, because this is how our city was (think of the paintings of Schikadenz).
Stratified architecture prompts story-telling. Lehel Hall too may, it seems, provoke some stories and interpretations.
…And the Fishwife’s Ship is launched (“Ritorna vincitor…”)
Translated by Stephen Humphreys and Csilla
* Rákóczi út (Rákóczi Road) is a main artery of central Budapest, named after Ferenc Rákóczi the Second, leader of an uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1703.
* Árpadházi Szent Margit (1242-1271), known in English as Blessed Margaret of the House of Arpaden. [trans.]