Letter from Budapest: Does the remade Hungarian capital offer a preview of Trump’s D.C.?

I arrived in Budapest on a nearly perfect spring day, a balm after an unusually long and dreary New Haven winter. Ferries crossed the silvery Danube. Pedestrians on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge paused to take selfies with the Art Nouveau Gresham Palace, now the Four Seasons Hotel, in the background. Beyond postcard views, though, there wasn’t a whole lot to cheer me in the Hungarian capital, which architects and political analysts alike see as a possible model for the changes, physical and otherwise, that Donald Trump hopes to impose on Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities. And in fact I left town with a depressingly clear sense of what may be in store for American civic architecture—a showy, gilded, and often Disneyfied approach, in short—in the second Trump administration.

Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minster, is also in his second stint in power. He led the country from 1998 to 2002 and returned to office in 2010. (Steve Bannon has hailed him as “Trump before Trump.”) Like the U.S. president, he has moved more decisively, and destructively, in his comeback term to implement his top priorities. One is to remake the capital in his own hyper-nationalist, neo-traditional image. In addition to commissioning new cultural venues from some of the world’s most prominent architects, Japan’s Sou Fujimoto among them, the effort has included demolishing certain buildings, buffing up others to a fresh sheen, and—most controversial of all—erecting new statues and works of architecture that are meant to, and often convincingly do, look old.

Though the campaign has slowed somewhat in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, it has already left an indelible mark on three key sites in the heart of Budapest. The most expansive changes have taken place in the hilltop district around Buda Castle, where Soviet-era additions have been removed in favor of fastidious replicas of landmarks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the shadow of the capital’s ornate Parliament Building, on the banks of the Danube, Orbán’s government has turned Kossuth Square into a vast symbol of state power. Finally, in Városliget, a vast city park three miles east of the river, architects including Fujimoto have had freer rein to break from historical precedent, with mixed and telling results.

As with Trump, much of Orbán’s strategy, and that of his Fidesz political party, is driven by grievance. In the Hungarian case, the precise source of the wound has less to do with personal pride—there is as far as I know no precise Hungarian equivalent of the Donald’s humiliation at the hands of Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner—and more to do with certain episodes in 20th-century history that the current administration is eager to expunge or rewrite.

Key among these is the Communist period, from the 1940s through 1989, when the democratic republic was established. Hungary was in those years a member of the Soviet bloc, with civic architecture—think broad-shouldered, flat-roofed, and often stolid modernism—to match. As a prominent Hungarian architect, Zsófia Csomay, told Le Monde, the recent changes to Budapest “do not follow the advice of architects but [Orbán’s] own taste, which is consistent with his political dream: to erase the period between 1944 and 1989.”

Orbán and his allies have filled the vacuum by rehabilitating figures from the pre-Communist era. Some of these, including Miklós Horthy, an authoritarian who ruled from 1920 to 1944, establishing close ties with Nazi Germany while expressing antisemitic ideas of his own, are well known. Others, like the architect Alajos Hauszmann, had been relatively obscure even in Hungary.

And yet Hauszmann’s face, and earnest descriptions of his role in lifting Budapest to architectural greatness around 1900, are now easy to find in the city. “He developed the Castle district into a true urban center,” reads one information panel I came across. “This is when the city quarter enjoyed its golden age.” Preservation work to restore several of his projects, including the 1901 Red Cross headquarters, with its grand cupola, is ongoing, as part of what is grandly known as the National Hauszmann Program. A marble bust of the architect, depicting a bald, bearded man with eyes fixed just over the shoulder of anyone facing it, is on prominent display in the Castle Museum.

It was Hauszmann’s nearby Riding Hall—or, rather, a replica of it—that I was most keen to see. Completed the same year as the Red Cross building and badly damaged in World War II—“although not irreparably,” another info panel adds, by way of tweaking the Communists’ lack of respect for Hungarian history—it was razed in 1950. And yet there it was in front of me, in all its glory, having been faithfully rebuilt, in a project completed four years ago, from the original drawings. Though used for parties and receptions, on most days it’s empty, the better to show off its soaring ceiling with painted, ornamented trusses, flanked on both sides by arched windows with stained glass in bright shades of yellow and green. 

This is an example of what’s known in the architecture world as an “authentic reproduction,” a phrase for which the critic Ada Louise Huxtable had particular disdain. “These are the con words of American culture,” she wrote in her 1997 book “The Unreal America.” “To equate a replica with the genuine artifact is the height of sophistry; it cheapens and renders meaningless its true age and provenance.”

UNESCO agrees. It has called for the Orbán government “to halt all ongoing and planned reconstruction works and to consider developing an alternative approach to conservation and development.” In a 2021 report, the U.N. agency warned that if the full Hauszmann Program “is carried out, and the construction of the post-war regime is reversed, this could create an illusion that does not correspond with historical reality.”

Illusion is the right word. To see the reconstruction projects before they’re complete is to be reminded just how much they rely on contemporary expertise and building techniques to pull off their historicist sleight of hand. I noticed at least a half-dozen structures being constructed of concrete and steel, in preparation for being draped in fin-de-siècle ornament. These suggested the substantial amount of muscular state power being flexed in service of what will be, in visual terms, rather frilly final products. They also distinguish Orbán’s architectural campaign from other recent efforts to reconstruct lost or damaged landmarks, as seen most prominently with Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, that have taken pains to use historically authentic materials and craftsmanship.

To get a better sense of how Orbán supporters and American conservatives view these efforts, I got in touch after returning home with Stephen Sholl, an American-born, Budapest-based former researcher at the Center for Architecture and Remembrance at Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium. “The central argument for the Hauszmann Program turns on the question of what exactly is being replaced and why,” he told me. “These aren’t buildings that happened to get burned down; these aren’t buildings that past generations just didn’t find use for, and so they grew dilapidated. The argument is that during the Communist regime most of these buildings could have been saved, and most of these buildings could have been renovated, but the Communists, because they wanted to minimize the symbols of the old order, chose not to.” He also points out that some of the structures the Orbán regime has demolished or remade were themselves replicas, some clumsy or inauthentic, that the Communists put up in the Castle district in the post-war decades.

The Hauszmann Program, Sholl went on to say, is “a physical manifestation of a conservative return to the public sphere. For a long time conservatives were more libertarian in their attitude toward the public sphere. The best government is the one that does nothing, that leaves things alone. And then you see a conservative reevaluation that says, you know, the left doesn’t leave the public sphere alone. The left believes we should tear down the statue in the park because it mars that public space. Well, we should also have the same attitude. We should try to mold the public sphere to our beliefs.”

Back down the hill, the dramatic redesign that Orbán’s government has carried out of the plaza fronting the 1902 neo-Gothic Parliament Building is no less meaningful politically. Some of the updates were aesthetic, turning a parking lot into a vast, mostly hardscaped plaza that is surely more cleaned-lined and attractive than what it replaced but also more clearly emblematic of state power. (My reaction walking across it was to recall the scale of the boulevard, laid out by Albert Speer, Jr., and adjacent plaza near the “bird’s nest” National Stadium in Beijing.) Other changes have had more nakedly revisionist motivations. A statue of Imre Nagy, former prime minister and a leader of Budapest’s 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, was removed from the square and relocated to a far less trafficked location nearby, a decision that some commentators linked to Orbán’s close relationship with Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, an imposingly grand replica of a monument to former prime minister (and Orbán hero) István Tisza, first erected in 1934 only to be damaged during World War II, has gone up immediately north of the Parliament building. It is almost magically spotless, due I’m sure to some combination of its newness and meticulous cleaning, as if to suggest that it is impervious to history, or to a version of it unkind to the current government and its supporters. Orbán gave an impassioned speech on its rededication on a hot day in 2014. As one observer has noted, “The statue is monumental, and here the word ‘monumental’ does not imply greatness. On the contrary, artistically speaking the general consensus is that it is a singularly worthless, if not outright hideous, work of overwhelming size—17 [meters] tall with a huge lion on top.”

What’s most striking about the zombified Kossuth Square is the combination of choices that are about emphasizing state power, as seen in the blunt, austere design for the expanse of the plaza itself, with carefully calibrated expressions of nostalgia for particular figures and political movements, which take the form of statuary inevitably figurative or dripping in ornament.

None of these approaches to monument-making or the rewriting of history will be unfamiliar to students of autocracy. But the architectural dynamic playing out in Városliget, the third and final stop on my Orbán tour, is I’d argue something new, with surprising if unnerving implications for the architecture of the Trump return. It’s here, in a 300-acre green expanse loosely equivalent to Central Park, that Orbán and his government have most dramatically embraced contemporary architecture, in the form of a new cultural district; informally the development is known as the “Liget project” or the “Liget museums.” There is a Museum of Ethnography, designed by Budapest architect Marcel Ferencz, that takes the form of two rising forms, suggestive of ski-jump ramps, facing one another; the fact that the slopes themselves are open to public access, offering dramatic views from either end, is the otherwise ham-fisted design’s saving grace. A planned New National Gallery in the park, by the Japanese firm SANAA, has stalled.

A short walk to the south takes you to Fujimoto’s House of Music, which holds a 320-seat auditorium, a lecture hall, and a café, among other spaces. It opened in early 2022. I have been an admirer of the 54-year-old Japanese architect’s work for nearly two decades, trekking on at least two occasions to the outskirts of Tokyo to visit his delicate, often poetic residential projects, which typically combine expanses of glass with delicate frames of white-coated steel. In recent years his work—especially his Grand Ring for Expo 2025 in Osaka­—has grown in scale and monumentality.

None of that prepared for the oddity that is the House of Music. It has a mushroom-shaped roof—supported by skinny columns meant to suggest the surrounding trees—that extends like an exaggerated canopy to cover a glassed-in main building. The roof is lined on the underside with gold, leaf-shaped panels made of an aluminum composite and cut through with dozens of openings, some with trees growing through them, that are also faced in gold. The ceiling panels continue into the lobby, a remarkably fluid space lined with floor-to-ceiling glass offering views of the park. It was buzzing with activity on the day I visited.

Fujimoto has called this fractal folderol an homage to the 1907 Franz Liszt Academy of Music, a stately Art Nouveau block in the heart of Budapest designed by Flóris Korb (who worked under Hauszmann for more than a decade) and Kálmán Giergl. Fair enough. But the House of Music is so heavily gilded inside and out that it not only departs substantially from Fujimoto’s typical approach, which holds ambition and precision in remarkable balance, but approaches full-on kitsch.

It is nearly impossible, of course, to imagine the Trump administration choosing an architect like Fujimoto for a prominent project on the National Mall or along the Potomac. The Liget development is not in this sense a direct precursor for Trump’s would-be architectural commissions. As Sholl told me, when it comes to prominent new buildings, Hungary under Orbán remains forward-looking in its outlook, perhaps to keep up with rival nations in Europe: “It’s only with the reconstructions that you see classical architecture.” Other sources I spoke to cautioned me not to assume that there are perfectly tidy parallels in the architectural and urban-planning aspirations of the two leaders. I have tried to heed this advice carefully.

All the same, the links between the governments and their guiding philosophies are by now—beyond Steve Bannon’s comment—quite clear, and arguably growing in number. According to Sholl, Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society and a Commission of Fine Arts member during the first Trump term, has visited Budapest to study the Orbán approach. Many American conservatives, Sholl added, “have looked at Hungary and said, ‘This is a government that gets things done. It’s not just a government that talks. It’s a government that acts.’ And architecture is a great way to show that something has been done.”

I had a chance to hear about those links firsthand when, coincidentally enough, Orbán’s Minister of Culture and Innovation, Balázs Hankó, visited New Haven just a few weeks after I returned from my visit to Budapest, to give a lecture sponsored by the Yale European Graduate Student Society. Before the talk, held in a spacious classroom in Rosenfeld Hall, less than two miles from my house, a student played Liszt on an out-of-tune piano while the rest of us snacked on macarons and drank middling Hungarian wine from plastic cups.

I was floored by how frank his presentation—which included slides touting the Liget buildings and the Hauszmann Program—was in advancing a nationalist, natalist, and borderline eugenicist series of arguments about Orbán’s priorities. I was also surprised by how unwilling the students in attendance were to challenge him. He bet—correctly, as it turned out—that the sort of white-pride, Christian nationalist rhetoric that would have nearly caused a riot at a school like Yale a decade ago might pass now essentially without comment.

Hankó said at one point that one of the government’s key goals is for Hungary to reach a population of 10 million by 2050. This surprised me. Wasn’t the population already essentially at that number? I realized, feeling suddenly naïve, that he wasn’t counting immigrants, even those who are or might be naturalized; he was talking only about ethnic Hungarians. That’s why his talk was so stuffed with references to birth rates, demographics, and national pride, echoing Orbán’s ominous warnings about “race-mixing.” (In any case, the effort seems to be failing.) To underscore the point, Hankó put up a slide that declared, “We Hungarians represent normality in Europe because: Instead of merging European and global cultures, we return to our Judeo-Christian cultural traditions.”

Along the top of that slide, and several others, was the phrase “Make Hungary and Europe great again.”

During the otherwise cheery Q&A, I raised my hand and, identifying myself as an architecture critic and a member of the School of Architecture faculty, and mentioning my recent visit, asked what I hoped would be a pointed question about the Hauszmann Program’s rather cavalier mixture of authentic and faux history. Hankó parried it easily and with a smile. As I was leaving a few minutes later, happy to be getting out of there, I felt a hand clap me firmly on the shoulder. I turned to see Hankó standing uncomfortably close, that smile now an almost absurd grin. “You simply must let me know the next time you’ll be in Budapest,” he said. “I’ll give you a personal tour.”

So what does this all mean for American civic architecture in the second Trump administration? The president has a well-documented fondness for hyper-gilded architecture, beginning with the interior of his Trump Tower apartment and reflected more recently in the ornament he’s added to the Oval Office. It would be no surprise, with the country’s 250th birthday coming up next year, if he moved to extend this golden trail out the door of the White House and onto the National Mall, where his administration has signaled it wants to kill off a planned National Museum of the American Latino. His 2020 executive order promoting neo-traditional architecture, of course, provided the road map, and in fact the General Services Administration changed its design guidelines based merely on a draft version of that order. A subsequent memo issued this year underscored his desire to make federal architecture “beautiful” again.

Trump’s recently passed mega-bill, looking ahead to the 250th, includes $40 million for a National Garden of American Heroes, an absurd idea he floated in the first term. Meanwhile the head of the Trust for the National Mall has said that the site “will serve as the nation’s front yard and center stage for the Semiquincentennial.” City Journal published an extremely on-brand essay in December calling on the president to take advantage of the anniversary to put up a giant triumphal arch in Washington.

The more fascinating question for me is what happens to experienced architects, whatever style they prefer, when they agree to work for autocrats. Near the end of the first Trump term, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill produced an elegant, streamlined design for a federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now under construction, that managed to avoid running afoul of the new GSA rules by combining classical proportions with abstract forms. Another courthouse approved in 2020, in Huntsville, Alabama, with Fentress Studios as lead designer, is more patently traditional, if also staid by Trumpian standards. If Trump follows Orbán’s lead and continues to turn more intently to culture-war battles in his second stint in office, he may take steps to bring architects working on federal projects more directly to heel.

Some of them may not need much convincing. The most unnerving feature of the House of Music, in the end, is the way it suggests an architect agreeing, and with real gusto, to lard a cultural building with golden ornament and heaps of showmanship. The evolution of the project is something distinct from the usual process of an architect adjusting a proposal to meet pragmatic or budgetary needs. What began in the earliest sketches as a subtle, ethereal design—"a smooth white world, in the familiar contemporary Japanese style,” as Oliver Wainwright put it—became flashier and gaudier, then flashier and gaudier still. This strange departure from the architect’s typical approach didn’t come out of nowhere; it is the direct product of a hard-line regime with ambitious revisionist goals and clear aesthetic priorities. There is a fealty to Orbán woven through the project, a willingness to amp up the architecture to meet one man’s expectations, that is both chilling and impossible to ignore.

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