All storiesAlkotmány 27 Revival: The Art of 3D Restoration in Budapest, Part I
Alkotmány 27 is a 1903 Art Nouveau building a few streets from the Hungarian Parliament, empty for over a decade and sold by the state in 2025. I rebuilt it in 3D from its original plans and my own photos to show what a restoration, and two new floors on the roof, could bring back.
Alkotmány 27 today: an Art Nouveau building behind a wooden canopy
Alkotmány utca 27 is an apartment building in Budapest's 5th district, a few streets from the Hungarian Parliament, designed by the architect Imre Benes in 1903 and completed in 1904. It has stood empty since the early 2010s. For more than a decade a wooden canopy has covered the pavement in front of it, with a yellow sign that says everything: Vigyázat! Leeső tárgyak! Caution, falling objects.
Look up and you can see why. At the top of the façade the plaster has come away from the gable down to the bare brick, and the cornice beneath it has gaps where pieces have already fallen. The paint is peeling off the original wooden windows, air-conditioning units have been pushed through some of the panes, and cables run across the front. On the ground floor the shopfronts are blocked and the entrance is boarded up behind its old wrought-iron gate. And yet the wrought-iron balconies are still there, their railings bending like plant stems, exactly as they were drawn in 1903.
Nobody commissioned this project. I walked past the building, could not stop looking at it, and wanted to see what it would look like if someone gave it the restoration it deserves. So I rebuilt it in 3D. It became the first part of The Art of 3D Restoration, my series in which I digitally restore forgotten Art Nouveau buildings in Budapest.
What style is Alkotmány 27?
It sits on the line between two eras. The structure of the façade is still classical: fluted pilasters, heavy cornices and a strong central bay. The details are early Hungarian Secession (szecesszió), Budapest's own branch of Art Nouveau: the swelling curve of the gable, the soft curved hoods over the windows, the small ornaments hanging beside them and the plant-like ironwork of the balconies.
That mix is typical of Budapest around 1900. The city was booming after the millennium celebrations of 1896, architects like Ödön Lechner were inventing a Hungarian version of Art Nouveau, and the Vienna Secession of 1897 was just across the border. Many apartment buildings of those years kept a classical skeleton and dressed it in the new, freer ornament.
The tall arched window crowning the gable looks like a studio window, and it may well be one. The building was planned with an attic studio, and the painter Zoltán Nuridsány lived and worked in its fifth-floor studio flat for the last fifteen years of his life, according to Pestbuda.
120 years of Alkotmány 27, from rental building to state auction
Alkotmány 27 was built as a rental apartment building, then spent most of the 20th century as offices, and ended up in state hands before the state sold it in 2025. The building's past, as Pestbuda reconstructed it from the archives and the land register:
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1903 | Imre Benes signs the plans for a rental building with an attic studio, commissioned by György Frischmann and his wife |
| 1904 | The building is completed |
| 1912 | Pannónia Rt. moves its head agency into the building |
| 1929 to 1939 | The architect and sculptor Andor Mészáros lives here, remembered by a plaque on the façade |
| 1930s | The National Unity Party (Nemzeti Egység Pártja) uses the building |
| 1960s | A repair company of the State Farms moves in |
| 1993 | The Water Museum, Archive and Library moves in, and the building returns to the state |
| Early 2010s | Last used, as the headquarters of OVIBER, then left empty |
| 2023 | I rebuild the building in 3D |
| July 2025 | The state sells it at auction |
Who bought Alkotmány 27, and for how much?
The Hungarian state sold Alkotmány 27 at an electronic auction held on 8 to 10 July 2025, at its starting price of HUF 2,697,583,000, close to €7 million. A first auction in June had drawn no bids. The state asset manager did not name the buyer, but the land register shows the building went to the Biggeorge 51 real estate development fund, whose main owner is the developer Tibor Nagygyörgy, as Válasz Online and 444 reported.
With 3,339 m² of floor space, the price works out at roughly HUF 808,000, or about €2,000, per square metre, for a building that needs a full renovation. It was the first of 15 government buildings in Belváros-Lipótváros the state put up for sale in June 2025, 13 of them historic buildings from before the First World War. The new owner has not announced plans for it yet.
Why restore an old building instead of replacing it?
Because the building already exists. The bricks, the stone and the ornament are already built, and a new building has to emit all the carbon of its construction again before anyone moves in. As the architect Carl Elefante put it, "the greenest building is the one that is already built."
There is a second reason, and for me it is the bigger one: a city's character lives in buildings like this. Every one that is restored instead of replaced keeps a piece of Budapest that could never be built again at that level of craft.
| Today | After the 3D restoration | |
|---|---|---|
| Façade | Plaster fallen to the brick, gaps in the cornice, stained walls | Cleaned plaster and repaired stucco ornament |
| Windows | Peeling paint, air-conditioning units in the panes | Restored wooden windows |
| Ground floor | Blocked shopfronts, a boarded entrance behind a wooden canopy | Reopened shops and a café terrace on the street |
| Roof | The original roofline | Two new floors set back behind the ornate parapet |
Why add new floors on the roof?
Vienna has shown how to pay for it. Developers there routinely add penthouses on top of historic apartment buildings, a Dachgeschossausbau, and the income from the new units helps fund the restoration of the façade below. 3SI is one of the Vienna developers working this way. The old building keeps its face, and the owner gets a reason to look after it.
I tested the same idea on Alkotmány 27: two new floors set back behind the original parapet, so they stay quiet from the street and let the Art Nouveau façade lead.
How do you reconstruct a historic façade in 3D?
Start from the original plans, then check every detail against what survives. For Alkotmány 27 I worked from the 1903 plans and my own photos from the street, modelled the whole building in 3ds Max and rendered it with Corona.
Where can you find original building plans in Budapest?
The Budapest City Archives keeps the historic building plans of the city, and many of them are digitised on Hungaricana, where you can search them by address for free. That is where I found the original plans of Alkotmány 27, signed by Imre Benes. For anyone restoring, or simply curious about, an old Budapest building, it is the first place to look.
Plans only tell you so much, though. A lot of the detail I got by sitting at the café across the street and studying the façade for a long time. The café made it into some of the renders too.
For the final images I used Corona's LightMix, which lets me change the lighting after the render is finished. The same view can become a bright morning or a warm evening without rendering it again, so I could show the building in the mood that suits it best.
What a 3D restoration is for
For a developer, an investor or an owner, a 3D restoration answers the question a photo of a crumbling façade cannot: what is this building worth once it is fixed? It lets you test a rooftop extension, compare colour schemes and show the result to buyers, partners or the district before anyone puts up scaffolding. And it shows the people walking under that wooden canopy every day what their street could look like.
This is part I of The Art of 3D Restoration. Part II is Visegrádi 17, a 1905 folk Art Nouveau building in Budapest's 13th district by the Vágó brothers, and its story is coming next.
Do you own or develop a historic building in Budapest, Vienna or Bratislava? I work fully remotely: send me the plans, and I'll show you what it can become. More of this project is in the Alkotmány 27 case study, and prices are on the 3D exterior page.
The short version
Alkotmány 27 is a 1903 Art Nouveau building in decline
Designed by Imre Benes and completed in 1904, the building stands a few streets from the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest's 5th district. It has been empty since the early 2010s, and a wooden canopy has protected the pavement from falling plaster for more than a decade.
The state sold it in 2025 for about €7 million
Alkotmány 27 sold at a state auction on 8 to 10 July 2025 at its starting price of HUF 2,697,583,000. The land register names the buyer as the Biggeorge 51 real estate development fund. For its 3,339 m², that is roughly €2,000 per square metre before any renovation.
Original plans are often online
Budapest's historic building plans are kept by the Budapest City Archives, and many are digitised on Hungaricana, searchable by address for free. I modelled Alkotmány 27 from its original 1903 plans, checked against my own photos from the street.
New floors on the roof can pay for the façade
In Vienna, developers routinely add penthouses on top of historic buildings and use the income to restore the façade. My renders test the same idea in Budapest: two new floors set back behind the original parapet.
