In 1879, the Hungarian city of Szeged was destroyed by the flooding Tisza River, necessitating its rebuilding from Lajos Lechner’s plans. With it, Szeged developed a central urban structure, with a circular embankment aligned with the boulevards protecting it from floods (Szegedi Körtöltés). In the 1930s, Dr. Endre Pálfy-Budinszky, Szeged’s chief architect, began developing a […]
Tag: urban planning
A Lost Opportunity: The Case of the Košice Ring Road
The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive view of the development of ring boulevards in Košice, to relate their emergence to the expansion of urban planning in the broader European region, and to explain why these boulevards do not fulfill the functions held by ring streets in the cities that served as […]
From Functional Urban Planning to the Art of Shaping Cities: The Ring Roads of Antal Palóczi in Miskolc and Budapest
The study is focused on the unrealized plans for ring roads in Buda and Miskolc created by Antal Palóczi at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Palóczi’s approach combined functional urbanism with aesthetic principles rooted in the artistic shaping of urban spaces. This dual approach was aligned with contemporary urban planning trends, represented […]
The Historicist Architecture of the Grand Boulevard in Budapest and Its Urbanistic Significance
The legacy of Hungarian historicist architecture has only attracted the attention of researchers in the past few decades. Although the Renaissance and Baroque Revival were the dominant architectural styles of the Habsburg era, historicism was long seen as an architecture copying the past using cheaper materials. Characterized by the reinterpretation of historical styles with contemporary […]
From Housing Estate to City?
Karviná and the Plans for a New Centre in the Karviná-Hranice Housing Estate Post-1989
The city of Karviná is an example of the process in which the meaning of a settlement changes over time, from economic and social ascent to a decreasing attraction. City development is continuously influenced by individual interventions, both planned and accidental, which can estimate and predict future developments only to a limited extent. We can […]
Under Threat: The Metastadt Building
Issue:
2011, Volume 45, No. 1 - 2
Until recently the Metastadt building system was considered among the failed architectural ideas of the 20th century. This utopian architectural concept attempted to introduce pioneering changes in modern urban planning and to test in practice the possibilities of industrialized building. Its innovation consisted of combining engineering solutions with the newly possible computer-based methods for statics […]
The Jewish Autonomous Region and the Czechoslovakian Jews: Hannes Meyer Writes on Birobidzhan
Issue:
2013, Volume 47, No. 1 - 2
With the partitions of Poland by the end of the 18th century, the Russian Empire acquired a large number of Jewish subjects territorially confined to the limits of the Pale of Settlement, an area comprising mainly the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From that time on, both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes looked for solutions to the […]
Heritage, Culture and Regeneration of the Former Military Areas in the City of Oradea, Romania
Issue:
2021, Volume 55, No. 1 - 2
There are places where history is still alive: heritage sites, locations of great cultural, scientific, educational, and social significance. The military presence in the city of Oradea, Romania, generated an impressive cultural-historical heritage, both tangible and intangible, as the consequence of centuries of alternative militarization and demilitarization processes. The aim of the article is to […]
Osmosis or Propaganda? Western Urbanism in Czechoslovak Architectural Press (1945 – 1960)
Issue:
2016, Volume 50, No. 3 - 4
The article investigates the representation of Western (West-European and Amer¬ican) urban planning in the professional architectural press in Czechoslovakia during the turbulent period of the early years of the communist regime in 1945 – 1960. Focusing on media discourse, the study discusses the transfer of architectural and urban design concepts within postwar Europe and ques¬tions […]
The Smooth Striped City
Issue:
2018, Volume 52, No. 3 - 4
The main aim of urban design should be to provide as elastic a plan as possible. This plan should define private and public space and allow its users the maximum possibilities and freedom to build. We seek such tools and methods that would be elementary but also sophisticated, which using only a few rules could […]
Bohuslav Fuchs’s “New Zoning”
Issue:
2019, Volume 53, No. 1 - 2
This article deals with a remarkable yet little-explored topic in the history of Czech urban and regional planning: the work of the well-known architect and urban planner Bohuslav Fuchs. The article focuses mainly on the post-war period, especially the 1960s, and on Fuchs’s devotion to “New Zoning”, the context in which his urban and regionalist […]
Afghanistan – No Place for Independent (Urban) Plans?
Issue:
2019, Volume 53, No. 3 - 4
In the period of the 1970s and 1980s, many international experts worked in Algeria and other African states. Among them were urbanists and architects from Slovakia, who mostly worked for the institution CNERU (Centre National d´Études et de Réalisations en Urbanisme), involving work in several cities such as Bedjaia, Blida, Colea, Sétife etc. These experts […]
Urban Planning and Construction of the Interwar City of Uzhhorod: Mission Interrupted
Issue:
2020, Volume 54, No. 1 - 2
After Uzhhorod became the administrative centre of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, the city gained a unique privilege – to become its capital at the time of development of modernism. The administrative and residential part Maly Galagov, which was created as a result of the gradual implementation of the main regulatory plan from 1920–1923, became the new core […]