Budapest is the 7th most visually-appealing city in the world
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They say there is no definition of beauty, but there is a formula – the Golden Ratio, to be exact. This has been used by scientists for thousands of years to ‘calculate’ beauty. Online Mortgage Advisor used the Golden Ratio to measure the beauty of more than 2,400 buildings in over 45 cities around the world to find out which city around the world has the most beautiful architecture on average and which cities are the most popular on Instagram.
The analysis of onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk found that Budapest is the 7th most visually-appealing city in the world – beating tourist hotspots, such as Milan, Paris, and Dubai.
How they measured this
The Golden Ratio (1:1.618) is a mathematical formula that is a set of proportions used by artists and scientists for at least 4,000 years to achieve the epitome of natural aesthetic perfection in art and design.
Using this ratio, they have given each building a “beauty score”, which is the average percentage of a city’s buildings that conform to the Golden Ratio. The higher the score, the closer a city’s buildings are, on average, to the Golden Ratio. For each city in their analysis, they
analysed the golden ratio proportions of iconic buildings and scanned Google Street View for residential streets with at least three buildings to measure their golden ratio proportions.
They measured Instagram popularity by analysing over 2 million Instagram posts that used the hashtag [name of city] + [architecture] for each city, i.e. #budapestarchitecture. They then compared the number of posts used under these hashtags to the relative size of each city in square metres to rank the popularity of each city accordingly. More details can be found HERE
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Key findings;
- Budapest is the 7th most objectively beautiful city in the world, scoring an impressive 75.9% match to the Golden Ratio formula.
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Budapest’s most beautiful building is St. Stephen’s Basilica with a near-perfect beauty score of 96.3%.
- In second and third place, with equally-impressive scores, are Fisherman’s Bastion with a beauty score of 94.6% and Vigadó Concert Hall, with a beauty score of 92.5%.
- Budapest’s architecture is more popular with Instagram users than Florence, Athens and Rome.