Viktor Orbán’s architectural ambition Budapest is having a renaissance

All of this attests to the complexity of historical symbolism in a city that has fallen under the control of numerous empires, not just German and Soviet but, before that, Ottoman and Habsburg. Against this background, Orbán’s urban schemes represent a narrative balancing act. The reconstruction of grand Gothic, classical and baroque structures evokes not primarily the Horthy era, but an earlier moment when, as a partner in the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, Budapest stood as a prestigious European capital. At the same time, reminders of Hungary’s historic vulnerability serve to sustain a nationalist siege mentality.

Yet this politics of architecture and memory also has a wider resonance. As numerous critics have pointed out, there is a trend towards architectural tradition and restoration among populist and reactionary movements. Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller emphasises the role conservative patrons have played in the reconstruction of Prussian edifices in Germany, most notably Berlin’s Hohenzollern Palace. Elsewhere, Müller compares Orbán’s architectural vision with those of religious populists Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi. Erdoğan has subverted Turkey’s secular design traditions with monumental mosques and Ottoman aesthetics, while in India, Modi has embellished his Hindu nationalist agenda with monuments, temples and the renaming of symbolic places.

Nor has this architectural culture war left the English-speaking world unscathed. In the last days of his first term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order decreeing that all federal buildings conform to a classical style, only for the Biden administration to rapidly rescind it. Think tanks advising British governments to support more traditional styles, such as Policy Exchange and Create Streets, have been aggressively denounced by progressives in the design world. According to Stephen Sholl, one of the conservative émigré intellectuals who have flocked to Hungary’s state-funded institutes, “traditionalists are the revolutionaries fighting against the entrenched beliefs and notions of modern architecture”.

But opponents of this populist tendency have struggled to come up with a coherent criticism of it, let alone an effective one. Where restoration involves ripping pages from the historical record, as with Orbán’s efforts to erase the Communist legacy from parts of Budapest, it can clearly be a manipulative act, replacing the complexity of the past with a deceptively simple narrative. Yet historical veracity is not the only thing that people want from public space. Many will prefer an attractive setting to an authentic one, and some will prefer not to acknowledge aspects of the past they find offensive. Such sentiments can be used to justify political schemes in architecture and planning, and it’s not always easy to say why they should be resisted. Orbán’s critics have been notably less vocal, for instance, about the removal of monuments associated with slavery and colonialism from Western cities.

Müller and others claim that historicist architecture allows populists to shape cultural attitudes. By evoking notions of heritage, these buildings are “an intervention on the side of tradition and supposed normality”, imprinting us with conservative assumptions about who we are and making us more protective of that identity. Müller even suggests that such conditioning can help to explain a growing acceptance of far-Right ideas in Germany.

The obvious flaw in this line of argument is that illiberal regimes are equally fond of modern architecture. In Budapest, Orbán’s reconstruction projects have their counterpoint in the Városliget, the city’s main park, where a new museum district is taking shape. Here we find ultra-contemporary, curvaceous glass and steel structures that would not look out of place among Pritzker Prize finalists. Authoritarian states from Azerbaijan to China, and above all Saudi Arabia, have eagerly commissioned global starchitects to design such monuments to modernity. As Müller himself points out, Modi and Erdoğan have each staked their image on airports, sports stadiums and modern office complexes as much as on temples and mosques.

This raises a further problem for critics of populist design. If that category can encompass both the traditional and the modern, what would a progressive or liberal alternative look like? Put simply, public architecture, and especially monumental buildings, are just not very well suited to conveying ideals like pluralism or openness. They can certainly function according to such principles, but someone has to decide how a building should look, and it can only have one form. If it indulges a popular appetite for heritage, pride, beauty or spectacle, it can be called populist. The only path left for progressive architecture is therefore one of negation, denying aesthetic expectations in the name of being inclusive or “challenging”. That tends to result in something like the Scottish Parliament Building in Holyrood, well regarded by design aficionados but broadly considered a depressing mediocrity.

Ironically, a liberal architecture becomes even less attainable if you believe that the built environment shapes attitudes and can even radicalise the public. In that case, it doesn’t matter what people think about a building, because it is the building that tells them what to think. Thus, in his own furious denunciation of traditional design as an “appeal to blinkered, quasi-fascist old white men”, the architect Sam Jacob argues that buildings should be “a form of resistance”, seeking to “hard-wire progressive ideas into the fabric of the world”. This outlook simply gives architects a license to enact their own visions in the name of engineering a just society.

This is not to say that public buildings should just reproduce familiar formulas in an endless stream of neoclassical monuments and flashy modern art galleries. We should give architects some freedom in the pursuit of aesthetic excellence, even if that sometimes leads to controversial work. Nor should we ignore the political agendas that are almost always present in the design of public space. But good architecture still has to respond in some way to the needs and desires of society, and in this respect it would be better to learn from the populist approach than to pretend it is mere propaganda.

Though it pains progressives to admit it, there has always been a place for reproduction and pastiche in modern architecture, because modern societies seek a connection with the past. This is as true of contemporary China, where the remains of the country’s pre-Communist heritage have today been painstakingly restored, as it was of the 19th-century Europeans who built structures like the Hungarian Parliament in a medieval Gothic style. The euphoria which greeted the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral last week was another expression of the sanctity that beautiful old buildings can achieve. Nor does this nostalgic tendency announce that a culture is no longer open to change; rather, it is a necessary counterweight to the constant change that modernity entails. Most people are not ideologues; they recognise that old and new can both have their place.

Besides, if anything can turn historic buildings from tourist attractions into symbols of identity, it is the suggestion that people should feel ashamed for admiring them. Therein lies the cunning of the restoration projects in Budapest; like many populist schemes, it is designed to provoke responses that make its opponents appear extreme. By claiming that architectural heritage is dangerous, Orbán’s critics are walking into his trap.

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Wessie du Toit writes about culture, design and ideas. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.

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