When I sat down to write about the architectural characteristics of the new Lehel Tér market, I was convinced of only two things. On one hand, I was delighted to finally see a kind of architecture that offers a comprehensive intellectual adventure on this otherwise increasingly boring Budapest street.
COURTYARD HOUSING REVIVAL
If an architect had designed the human hand, William Mitchell told his students at UCLA in the early 1980s, all the fingers would be equally long. Mitchell, now dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, drew laughs for that joke because its truth was instantly recognizable: there is something standardizing in the architectural instinct.
THE NEW MODERNISM OF HELMUT JAHN
One of the duties of the architecture critic is to place the work of architects into tidy boxes. Labels are handy for this: modern, late modern, postmodern, revivalist, classicist, deconstructivist. But sometimes the most interesting work doesn't quite fit into a tidy box.