Location Spotter: the Wekerle Estate
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via Wikipedia Commons
One great aspect of Budapest is that potential locations continually reveal themselves. The city is expansive, and what is cinematic doesn’t end at the ring road. Take for example the Wekerletelep, or Wekerle Estate in English.
Imagine a rural village in the middle of the city: a place that could pass for the quiet berg where your average Transylvanian vampire calls home, or the setting where a young man is preparing to defend his lady friend’s honor in first duel. All the feelings of romance and Gothic creepiness are apparent in and around the Wekerle Estate in Budapest. Originally built to house the influx of workers to the city in the late 19th Century, the area was conceived as a kind of agrarian housing development. Built between 1909 and 1926, it was originally named the Kispest Workers and Clerks Settlement.
via Wikipedia Commons
The Transylvanian feel of the buildings on the Estate’s central Kós Károly Square comes from the primary architect, Károly Kós, who brought to the project his Transylvanian rustic sensibility. This is especially apparent in the use of wood in building and ornamentation.
When you consider the housing developments that came not long afterwards, in the form of Communist block houses, or as we know them, tenements, the Wekerle Estate is all the more amazing and humane as a housing solution. It was noted that back in 1917, inhabitants could earn enough revenue on the fruit they sold from the estate grounds to make rent many times over. These days, the real estate around the square is highly sought after and, though there have been a few unfortunate architectural additions to the square, much of the country feel remains in this ‘village in the city’.
For more great photos, visit a site dedicated to the Wekerle Estate here.
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