Bálna
Glass whale-shaped shell over nineteenth-century river warehouses, now galleries, shops and events.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Balna in Budapest starts with four brick river warehouses raised in the 1870s to store Hungary's wheat harvest, and the 2006 competition a Dutch architect won with a plan to wrap them in a glass and steel shell shaped like a whale. It follows the project into a legal war between the city and its developer, which froze construction with the steel ribs left exposed to the weather. Locals just called the half-built shell the whale and waited, watching Budapest argue for years in courtrooms over who actually owned it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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