Hungarian Parliament Building

After Pozsony the Hungarian Diet met sometimes in the Pesti Vigadó, sometimes in the National Museum. Around 1840 Mihály Pollack drew a Renaissance building for Palatine Joseph that was never built, and the competition announced in 1844 for a site on what is now Erzsébet tér was overtaken by the revolution of 1848–49: its 42 entries went unjudged and most of the drawings were lost. A chamber meant as a temporary one, to Miklós Ybl's design, went up in barely eleven months from 1865 in Bródy Sándor utca, and the Italian Cultural Institute occupies that building now.

Buda, Óbuda and Pest were united as Budapest in 1873, and seven years later the Diet resolved on a permanent parliament house facing the Danube, to express the sovereignty of the nation. Act LVIII of 1880 authorised it and the competition was announced in 1881. When the deadline closed on 1 February 1883, nineteen designs had come in, and four equal prizes were divided between Imre Steindl's neo-Gothic 'Alkotmány I.', Alajos Hauszmann's 'Patres conscripti', the joint 'Alkotmány II.' of Albert Schickedanz and Vilmos Freund, and 'Scti. Stephani regis' by Otto Wagner and his partners. Two of the unsuccessful designs were built anyway, as the Ethnographic Museum and the Ministry of Agriculture facing the parliament across the square.

One reason Steindl's plan was chosen is that its neo-Gothic elevations bore a strong resemblance to the Palace of Westminster. Leading Hungarian politicians of the century held it extremely important that the new parliament should express the country's commitment to western Europe, and above all to Britain, which Hungarian reformers treated as a political model. The dome owed much to a centrally planned Vienna church by Steindl's teacher there, Friedrich von Schmidt.

The first spade went in on 12 October 1885. Only Hungarian materials were to be used, the exception being eight marble monoliths of six metres each beside the grand staircase, brought from Sweden; twelve were cut, and the other four stand in the parliament in London. About a thousand people worked on the site in an average year across seventeen years, shifting 176,000 cubic metres of earth and consuming 40 million bricks, half a million ornamental stones and 40 kilograms of gold. Steindl went blind, and then died before the work was done.

The Assembly held its first sitting in the still-unfinished building on 8 June 1896, the millennial year of the Hungarian state. Both houses had moved in by 1902 and the work ran on until 1904. At 268 metres long and 123 metres wide it has been the largest building in Hungary since its completion, and it was one of the two tallest in Budapest along with Saint Stephen's Basilica until the MOL Campus topped out in 2021. It is one of the first district-heated buildings in Europe; its boiler house was put into service in 1899, in the courtyard of an office building Steindl also designed.

The legislature has been unicameral since the Second World War. Through the People's Republic of Hungary a red star stood on top of the dome. On 23 October 1989 Mátyás Szűrös declared the Hungarian Republic from the balcony facing Kossuth Lajos Square, and the star was taken down in 1990 after the fall of communism.

Act I of 2000 moved the Holy Crown of Hungary and the coronation regalia, the coronation mantle excepted, out of the Hungarian National Museum, where they had been shown since 1978, and into the domed central hall. The wording of the law was that Hungary was raising the crown to its proper place, taking it from the museum of the nation and putting it under the protection of the National Assembly that represents the nation. Among the paintings kept in the building is Mihály Munkácsy's Honfoglalás of 1893.

The building is the seat of the National Assembly and of bodies such as the Library of Parliament, and the government uses only a small part of it, the other wing taking occasional events. Of its two mirror-image chambers, the former lower house is where the Assembly sits; the former upper house is used for conferences, receptions and guided tours. Reconstruction of the external façades was completed in 2014, and the ornamental lighting was renewed between 2012 and 2014. The Assembly runs ticketed public tours of the building.