Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

The Parish Church of St. Michael, 1930

■ View of the church trom the northeaót

Within walking distance of outer Váci út and "Duna Plaza” (a shopping centre with a 'rolling cube’ facade), in a mixed architectural environment, there stands a church devoted to the archangel who weighs souls on the Day of Judgement. God’s house here stands in a quarter once called Tripolis after the name of a former tavern, amidst three housing estates—one consisting of blocks with miniature flats built in the 1910s, another, from the 1950s, of buildings in Socialist- Realist style, and the third of prefabricated concrete blocks made in the 1970s.

Designed by Ernő Foerk (1868-1934), the church is a free-standing building of cross-aisled basilica construction with a capacity of 2000 and a semi-circular apse closed with a quarter-dome. The building, which is covered with a coffered (reinforced-concrete) plane ceiling, follows, on account of the proportions of its interior spaces, from the imitation proto-Christian style of 1920s church architecture. However, the arrangement of the dual towers at the front and the form of the architectonic details are recognisably similar, although in a simplified version, to the Votive Church in Szeged (1903-30), whose construction