The Reconstruction of the city centre of Veszprém, Hungary

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In the 20th century the city management started to reconstruct the city centre twice but the reconstruction has never been finished.

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Finally the reconstruction was finished a few years ago: we started to work on it in 2008 and it was finished in 2014.

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You can see a long street in the city centre, on the one side of the street there is the old part of the city centre and on the other side there is a 20 storey building with the shopping center, which was built in 1970. Kossuth street is a long street is the walking street in the city.

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There are three important elements of the project |

Simplification
We wanted to tidy up the city centre, because it looked pretty chaotic: there was no concept in the function of the different roads, streets and buildings and the billboards looked chaotic as well, we simplified the circulation and spaces.

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Connections
There was also another functional problem that we wanted to arrange. The problem was that the city centre and the new shopping centre (which was built in 2000), the market and the bus station were on the two different sides of the Jutasi road, which is a main road and it is very busy all day long.

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The old underpass, was dark and narrow. We wanted to make a stronger connection between the two sides of the Jutasi road and make the underpass light and wide. The second element of the project was the rebuilding of the underpass and the prolongation of the walking street, the Kossuth street.

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Reconstruction and Improvement
The reconstruction of the main street, Kossuth street, and the reconstruction of the connected squares. The street surface and the street furniture were in bad condition. We used 25×50 cm sized and 8 cm thick granite paving stones and semmelrock la linia in the same size. We sourced the street furniture, from UBCITE in the Czech republic. We used concrete to build retaining walls and cassettes for plants. We built information pavilion, fountain, toilet pavilion, play ground, pergola, container storage pavilions with white covers.

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site-plan

City centre of Veszprém

Location | Veszprém, Hungary
Project area | 30000 m2 public space and 29 m2 information pavilion

Architecture | Veszprémi Építész Műhely Ltd., Főmterv Ltd., Speos Ltd.
Architects | Zsolt György Kovács, Jana Beránková, Dávid Kovács, Márton Becker, Péter Lukács

Landscape design | Dr. Albert Fekete
Traffic engineering | Kinga Tóth
Structural engineering | Gábor Huszka
Public utilities | László Tuboly
Accessibility | Ágota Ruttkay
General contractor | Vemévszer Ltd.

Client | Veszprém City Council

Photography | Dávid Kovács

About Damian Holmes 3429 Articles
Damian Holmes is the Founder and Editor of World Landscape Architecture (WLA). He is a registered landscape architect (AILA) working in international design practice in Australia. Damian founded WLA in 2007 to provide a website for landscape architects written by landscape architects. Connect on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/damianholmes/