The Reconstruction of the city centre of Veszprém, in Hungary

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

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

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.
This long street is the walking street in the city. Its name is Kossuth street.

There are three important elements of the project:

1. The first one: 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. So We wanted to make a trim, order.

2. The second element: 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.
The second problem was that there was an old underpass, but it was dark and narrow.
So we wanted to make a stronger connection between the two sides of the Jutasi road and make the underpass light and wide.
So the second element of the project was the rebuilding of the underpass and the prolongation of the walking street, the Kossuth street.

3. The third element was 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.
So We had to change them.
We used 25x50 cm sized and 8 cm thick granite paving stones and semmelrock la linia in the same size.
We exchanged the street furniture, with UBCITE from 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 eternit covers.
So there was a functional expansion too.

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

Photos: Dávid Kovács

Client: Veszprém City Council

General contractor: Vemévszer Ltd.