Avenue of Cars
Entry for the „Szeretem Budapestet” (I Love Budapest) competition — aether architecture, October 2005. By Szabolcs (Adam) Somlai-Fischer, Anita Pozna and András Kangyal. Awarded 3rd prize.
The Buda embankment is 90,000 square metres — and all of it on the waterfront. The proposal reads the quay as it is (context), then layers new functions and technologies onto it.
Current state and context
011 — Traffic jam / almost-communities. Though we are locked into nearly one shared space, the separation of sound excludes any possibility of communication. Time spent in jams can add up to 2–3 hours a day for many city dwellers — an enormous amount of time in which we cannot live our social, thinking lives. And yet, with so many of us in such a small space, one has to wonder: couldn’t something be invented?
012 — Access / running across. Frogger, one of the first computer games (Konami, 1981), models the crossing attempts of a frog with suicidal tendencies. It is an old desire.
013 — Alternative uses. The city can be used in far more ways than its designers imagine. It is a bit like the trails worn into park grass: however the built paths were laid out, use often produces much more sensitive solutions.
014 — Cultural sediment. The Danube’s identity is confoundingly symbolic: it rolls its pebbles from the past into the future, and the other way around. A small, beautiful pebble found on the shore at Szentendre set out several hundred years ago in what was then Germany, and will reach the Black Sea in the distant future. Strange — we always expect the future from the west and sense the past in the east.
015 — Budapest’s eye. If we had no Citadella, we could build a lookout. How good it would be to enjoy the view from the quay at leisure, as from an unrolled Ferris wheel.
New functions and technologies
021 — Avenue of Cars / commuting communities. We would create a hybrid space where it is the road that moves, powered by the energy of the Danube — giving pedestrians a smoke- and noise-free park-quay, and drivers a predictable travel time. Meanwhile, the cars’ cabins are linked in the electromagnetic field, so an ad hoc community can form.
That is: let the road move, not the cars — like a ferry, using the river’s energy. For pedestrians, the steps and ramps would move with the current, southwards, each level at a slightly different speed, so the differences are never felt. Because those are the bad part of traffic: the speed differences, the stinking cars rushing past. Removing these two problems creates a new function — the avenue of cars. Instead of the speed conflicts of traffic, a homogeneous commuting platform emerges, dissolving diffusely at its edges.
The other answer to the almost-community of the traffic jam is to place people travelling near each other into one shared sound-space. The car radio is the channel; responses can be read off the windscreens. By making the radio-spaces local, I will really be chatting with the drivers around me.
022 — Water sport / stone-skipping course. The best thing one can do on a river bank. It needs good pebbles, and the underside of the bridge displays how many skips each throw made — you can compete. Hall of fame. The current world record is 38 skips.
023 — Floating messengers. Small, home-buildable SMS message-keepers powered by the water. At night they join forces to write our messages onto the surface of the river.
A message does not only matter when I know its recipient. Today’s technologies mostly serve that case — yet we used to carve messages into tree trunks, addressed to a place and to ourselves. This little unit, running on the water’s energy, keeps my SMS for eternity. A message in a bottle.
The boards above include the section and plan drawings (M 1:200) at the stone-skipping course.
Credits
Andras Kangyal, Anita Pozna, Adam Somlai-Fischer
Publicity
3rd Prize on the “I Love Budapest” competition.
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