After writing about Zoltán Boboreki-Kovács’s sculptures in my last post, I tried to find out something about the building they decorate.
It’s part of Imre Madách Square, a Budapest city led development designed by Gyula Wälder and commenced in 1937. The Square leads to a grand arch and on either side are matching apartment blocks. Kovac’s reliefs are cut into travertine facings on the south block (shown with a marker in the picture).
Wälder is said to have adapted Baroque forms to modern developments, though I can’t see that in the Madách Square development. Early in his career he designed sections of the Wekerle Estate, an Arts-and-Crafts style development influenced by the English garden city movement. His historicism drew criticism from his contemporaries and from architects of the socialist period, but Madách Square is now a protected development and is pleasantly pedestrianised.
MARSHALL COLMAN 