Budaörs Public Airport, circular hall (FLT/22715.)

On 20 June 1937, Hungary’s new, international public airport opened in Budaörs. It was one of the first public construction projects to be facilitated by the economic boom that the country experienced in the late 1930s. The complex, which was a joint investment of the state and Budapest, was to replace the Mátyásföld aerodrome, whose facilities had become completely outdated. The city council purchased the 100 acres of land designated for the construction, handed over its ownership to the state, and agreed to connect it to the roads leading to Budapest and Lake Balaton. The state, in its turn, took out a loan to cover the rest of the investment.
Before planning commenced, a twelve-strong delegation visited airports in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, England and Belgium to study examples worth emulating and best avoided. The lessons of this study trip were used to define the requirements of the design competition that was announced in February 1935. Three, somewhat contradictory criteria were set: the use of state-of-the-art technology and architectural solutions, strict cost containment, and contracting only domestic builders and suppliers.
Virgil Bierbauer and László Králik each submitted a design for the air terminal, but the jury requested them to work together and conflate the two plans. The resulting two-storey terminal—rounded, streamlined volumes arranged symmetrically along the central axis—is still considered an outstanding monument of Hungarian modernist architecture.
Arriving at the entrance on a ramp, passengers entered the galleried, circular hall on the first floor. This was the waiting area, whose entire rear wall was comprised of floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of the runway and the hills of Budaörs. Offices of the airlines and IBUSZ were accessible from this hall. The same row of rooms housed the bank, the hairdressing salon and the toilets, and gave access to the terrace that served as an open-air waiting area.
After being weighed, the luggage was slid down a chute to the ground-floor check-in area, whence it was loaded on the aircraft. The customs and passport control desks on the ground floor were accessible from the waiting area via a staircase on either side. After control, passengers could walk through the ground-floor doors to reach the aircraft. The customs warehouses were located in the middle of the ground floor, and the offices of the customs, police and gendarmerie were located on the sides.
A circular corridor connected the gallery level of the hall with the headquarters offices and the rooms of the radio and meteorological station. The control tower, which met the demanding technological requirements of the tender, was placed on the roof of the terminal building.
There were only three artworks to complement the austere interior design and furnishings, which were necessitated by the low budget and which prioritized function. The parapet of the balcony still bears a montage by Mrs Elemér Marsovszky (of Belvárosi Fotóműhely), composed of aerial photos of cities and landscapes in Hungary and abroad, while two strips of wall were decorated with maps of Europe and Hungary, the works of painter István Pekáry. Mrs Elemér Marsovszky was also responsible for the photographic documentation we know, made shortly after the 1937 inauguration.
There was a small hotel for passengers on the first floor of the wing on the right of the central hall, while the ground floor housed a restaurant the public could access from the street, and another one that was outside the customs frontier and served only transit passengers who had passed through customs. On the first floor of the left wing, there were rest areas for flight crews. On the ground floor were the police and customs stations, the technical directorate, the post office and medical facilities. The driveway serving these ran behind the ramp. There was a terrace on the roof of each wing, which the audience of the air shows that were held at the airport could reach via stairways that were not accessible for passengers. Underneath the ramp, there were parking spaces for the service vehicles and an air-raid shelter.
The terminal building was much liked by contemporary architects. It was reported on in detail in the architectural journal Tér és Forma (1937/8) and it was praised even in the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera (1937/21) for a design that took its inspiration from the formal vocabulary of aeroplanes.
With a length of 140 metres and a depth of 41 metres, the hangar of the airport was the largest in Europe at the time. The design competition for it was announced in the spring of 1937, and was won by the joint submission of architect László Czakó and György Méhes, an engineer.
The airport is still in use, serving sport and light aircraft aviation in Budapest. The complex, which married the valuable architecture of the terminal with some cutting-edge technology of the period, is protected as a historic building.
by Sarolta Sztankovics