Hungarian Parliament Building
The parliament on the Danube is one of the largest buildings in Europe. It combines a Gothic Revival façade with spires and buttresses and a Renaissance dome at its centre, and embodies the self-confident historicism of the 19th century. It was built to assert Hungary’s equality with Austria in the Dual Monarchy.
After the Compromise of 1867 Hungary became a kingdom in its own right in union with Austria, and Budapest was formed in 1873 by merging Buda, Óbuda and Pest. An architectural competition in 1882 was won by Imre Steindl, who took the Palace of Westminster in London as his model. Building began in 1885, and the house was inaugurated in 1896, on the millennium of the arrival of the Magyars, but was completed only in 1904.
The dome is 96 metres high, a number that alludes to the year 896, and the building has two identical halves for the former bicameral system. The façade is Gothic, but the plan and the dome follow Renaissance order, a typically historicist way of choosing what suited each part best. Since 2000 the Hungarian Holy Crown, the Crown of St Stephen, has been kept in the domed hall.