SEGD_Design - (Page 17) no. 23 Journal House of Terror A Budapest museum remembers the tyrannies of the Nazi party and the Soviet-backed secret police. BY JAN LORENC, WITH RICHARD LORENC BY JAN LORENC, WITH RICHARD LORENC At Budapest’s Terror Háza museum, a graphic canopy casts shadows over the former prison at 60 Andrássy Street, recalling the terror inflicted on Hungarians by the Nazi party and the Soviet-based Hungarian secret police. (All photos: Courtesy Terror Háza Museum) he slow, viscous drip-drop of oil fills the entrance lobby with an eerie, unsettling noise. A continuous flow obscures the faces of hundreds of victims of tyranny who were tortured and killed in the very building that now memorializes them, a wing of an infamous government complex that sits at 60 Andrássy Street in Budapest, Hungary. The Terror Háza Museum—opened in 2002—is a reminder of the mass brutality of 20th century wars and revolutions, and a monument to the people who played roles both inside and outside the building’s cavernous underground prison cells. It documents the period beginning in 1944 when the Nazis gained power in Hungary, to the early 1990s, when the Iron Curtain fell and Hungarians finally gained freedom from Communism. Hungarian architects János Sándor and Kámán Újszászy designed the museum as a monument to failed ideas and innocent victims. Working from a mindset beyond simple architecture, they recognized the need to create the right ambiance to guide visitors through recent history in a respectful and subtle way. Thematically, the museum juxtaposes the dual hazards of the Nazisupported Arrow Cross Party and the Soviet-backed secret police. 14 segdDESIGN T This comparison is clear from the beginning. A large cross and a large star each cast shadows on the street below the building. These logos are flanked by the word “terror,” which casts its own shadow. The designers placed these features onto a large awning that hangs over the roofline of the building, which otherwise appears unchanged from its time as a prison. Many of the rooms inside the museum have been preserved to appear as they did before Hungarian liberation. The director’s office is still luxurious, and his receiving area still resembles an AustroHungarian Imperial-era room that has been painted over so as to erase the memory of the past. There is even a limousine parked inside the museum, its lights slowly rising to reveal plush red seating areas and champagne glasses reserved for the perpetrators. But just as the museum highlights the excess of criminals, it focuses on the deprivation and inhumane treatment of their victims. The architects preserved the expansive prison, which not only fills the basement of 60 Andrássy Street, but also had been expanded by the Communists into the basement areas of a number of other buildings on the block.
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