György Szloszjár

Senior landscape architect, environmental protection engineer, founder, co-owner, managing director of the Garten Studio Ltd., father of two sons. For 15 years (since 2009), he has been a board member of the Landscape Architecture Section of the Hungarian Chamber of Architects.

During his 30-year career he has designed hundreds of public spaces, parks, and gardens. His best-known works are the rehabilitation of the Budapest City Park (Városliget), renovation of Bakáts tér in the IX. district, Budapest, rehabilitation of downtown Békéscsaba and design of its main square (Szent István tér), design of the Újbuda City Center, reconstruction of Dunakapu tér in Győr, new center of Üllő City, Dunaújváros main square - Danube promenade and lookout, Jászberény downtown complex transformation, and the landscape design of Graphisoft Park, or the historic renovation of the Orczy Garden.

In 2014, his success were acknowledged with the Landscape Architect of the Year Award. His completed works were honored with numerous awards in recent decades: Europa Nostra Award, Public Area Renewal Award, Budapest Architecture Award - Commendation, Landscape Architecture Project Award.In the book "Landscape Architect Stories" published for the 25th anniversary of the founding of their company, he describes himself as follows: "I have a relationship with the landscape. I see her as a fallible living being who is sometimes not worth getting upset about, just watching from a distance, sometimes proud and implacable, but sometimes fallen and longing for helpful care. (...) This relationship cannot get tired, every new task begins with courtship. You have to run the familiar circles, which may be familiar, but they are by no means the same. If I do well, if the team does well, we will reach the goal. We decode the space, feel its system of proportions, and create a new, happy place."

The City Park is one of the first public parks in Europe to be created by a city for its citizens, at its own expense and on its own land. Its history is a turbulent one. The former pasture land was put out to a design competition in 1816, where Heinrich Christian Nebbien's design was chosen as the winner. The park developed according to his design for some three decades, reaching its golden age in the early 1840s, when it 'served as a pleasant place of recreation and amusement for all classes of the citizens'. It then lost a third of its original size due to questionable decisions, was converted into an exhibition site during the Millennium, was further reduced in the 1950s to create the Parade Square, and was the site of the Budapest International Fair.

The fate of this worn-out, technically obsolete and neglected park could have taken many ways, but it was eventually redeveloped as a cultural and tourist site as part of the Hungarian Government's plans to create a museum district. A building program was soon drawn up, which unfortunately preceded the professional and political dialogue on the park's rehabilitation. To ensure that the values of the public park were given due weight in this advanced process, the landscape architects' associations initiated negotiations and concluded a tripartite agreement with the developer to carry out the landscape architecture tender and subsequent planning, in which important professional guarantees were laid down.

The competition was completed in spring 2016 and the winner was Garten Studio Ltd. The jury awarded the first prize to a concept that went back to the original landscape garden design and, while not reconstructing the park in its original form, brought back many of its original elements in terms of structure and function. Planning started that year and is expected to be completed by the end of 2024. In parallel with the design, the first three phases of the park development have already been completed and are proving hugely popular. But while Budapest has grown many times in two hundred years, the City Park has only shrunk. It is therefore unable to provide the space we would expect it to provide, and this situation is not helped by the arrival of new museum buildings. This is why the complex development of the Városliget is still a popular topic of debate. In the opinion of the designer, the ideal solution would be park developments on a similar scale in Budapest, which would provide an opportunity for task-sharing at municipal level. In this way, ecological goals could be achieved at the metropolitan level, many events could be moved out of the Liget, and the increase in available capacity would reduce the pressures on the Városliget, while the park could recover.