If someone has not been to the fortresses and palaces of Hungary in the last 20 or 30 years, and is just now returning to see the biggest attractions, they are definitely in for a big surprise, seeing how much has been completely renovated over the years.

The most characteristic sights of Budapest are its iconic Art Nouveau buildings—in almost all of the grey streets of our capital, we can find at least a few colourful Art Nouveau edifices, as well as the different forms and cultural traditions of its eras.

According to Walter Gropius, the ‘idea of the Bauhaus’ provides an artist with the skills with which he can occupy his place in the (machinery) industrial society. Let’s take a closer look at how this trend shaped the image of the Hungarian capital.

A renaissance of exceptional Hungarian architecture is good news not only for art lovers, but also because great buildings create connections and build community.

It is not only the architectural heritage of the capital city that the Fidesz government has been eager to preserve, but that of the countryside as well.

The conquerors shaped Hungarian cities and architecture: Christian temples were redesigned as mosques, new minarets and spas were built.

The Hungarian Museum of Ethnography moves to a building custom-designed for it for the first time in its one-hundred-and-fifty-year history. The new building in the Hungarian capital is one of the top products of contemporary architecture.

‘Complex simplicity’, was the catch-phrase picked by a critic to sum up the work of the Japanese architect, and this complex simplicity is indeed manifested in the House of Music, Hungary.  

Scruton traced back our classical understanding of beauty to the Enlightenment period, and argued that in our increasingly secular world beauty is a path back to the transcendent.

This is Budapest: a big city that dreamed and then built for itself a colourful past during the last decades of the old world, in those final moments before the dawn of modernism.