The Modernist Mirror
By Maria Carolina Nassif, Evva Parsons, and Yitong Xu
This zine seeks to to understand the landscape of the Buda Castle District, with its gaps and reconstructions, within the current political aesthetic moment of 2023. To do so, it includes archived pasts of the district, renovation plans, and interviews from residents and experts. The work accesses the Castle District and its history through the Hilton Hotel, a modernist building constructed in the 1970s on the partial ruins of a Jesuit college which had been built upon the remnants of a medieval Dominican monastery. It uses the metaphor of a mirror to examine both the values and ideologies reflected in the built environment of the Castle District and those concealed behind the mirror of the material space of the neighborhood.
This project was completed as part of the History in the Public Sphere master’s program (Central European University) during the month-long internship with Open Society Archives.
