OFFICE BUILDINGS AS ELEMENTS OF CITY IMAGE OF BUDAPEST
Abstract
At the end of 2012 we registered a total of 438 office buildings in Budapest. There are 19 such establishments on the average in each district, with a total area of 122,370 m2, but there are large differences across the districts in both respects. Ninety-three per cent of the office buildings are in the 14 districts that made the administrative area of Budapest before 1950. The largest number of office buildings (82) can be found in District 13, followed by District 11 (56) and District 9 (41), which makes 40.8% of all office buildings in the Hungarian capital city.
Thirty-two (i.e. 7.3%) of the 438 office buildings in Budapest are not only offices but accommodate residential homes, shops, storage facilities, laboratories and hotels as well. The most typical mixed function is to have shops on the ground floor or the lower floors of the buildings. The developers/operators offer several services to their tenants in almost all office buildings. Most generally there is a 24 hour reception service and guarded parking lots. Other services depend upon what category the establishment belongs to (A, B, C or green office building).
Office buildings proliferating like mushrooms have brought significant changes in the morphology of Budapest: they have influenced and transformed the cityscape, building up and the structure of the city. The majority of the office buildings are multi-storey buildings, of 4-8 floors most typically, built in closed lines or blocks, so they have a typical city, in fact, big city character. They were often built on empty inner city sites or in former industrial areas on the edge of the city center, so they increased both the vertical diversity and the horizontal homogeneity of building up in Budapest. Many inner city palaces were renewed and decorated by the developers, so there was a positive change also from an aesthetic aspect. Office buildings pushed the construction style of multi-storey closed buildings towards the edge of the city, especially in the city districts called Angyalföld, Ferencváros and Újbuda.
As regards their functions, office buildings are primarily workplaces, although some buildings may have mixed functions. As approximately 150 office buildings have been built so far in the inner city of Budapest, their presence has evidently contributed to the further penetration of workplaces within the city centre. The loss of residential functions is a process going on for years (not only because of the office buildings), so the inner belt of workplaces, the city of Budapest is more and more characteristic, parallel to growing and moving outwards, like a patch of ink on a piece of paper. The presence of office buildings has contributed to the extension of the city to the north and to the south along the Danube River, so it ends at the city part called Vizafogó in the north and reaches almost to the Rákóczi Bridge in the south. The other significant change in the functional structure of the capital city is the decrease and disappearance of the size of industrial areas from the inner city districts, to which process office buildings have evidently contributed: many of them have been built on brownfield areas, run-down industrial areas, especially in the former industrial zones of South Pest (Ferencváros), South Buda (Kelenföld) and North Pest (Angyalföld). These areas are going through a continuous change of function which can also be seen as an urban regeneration process.
