Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)

medium-sized (ten to fifteen storey tall) high-rises were designed for both the Buda and the Pest sides, leaving geomorphologic circumstances out of consideration. As first conceived, these plans would have embedded the first-born high-rise in the overall project of renewing the entire Pest Danube bank, but the economic and political developments of the era, together with certain interests exerting their influence on urban planning, pushed such plans into the background.

By 1966, as a symbol of domestic detente and a foretaste of the lenient "New Economic Mechanism”, the first Pest high-rise was built: designers János Pomsár and Tamás Puskás’s thirteen-storey head office of the company Hungarotex at the corner of Kossuth Lajos utca and Szép utca. It was then, too, that a sixteen-storey apartment block was raised to plans by Zoltán Boross in Buda on a site bordered by Alagút utca, Attila út and Pauler utca.

These were followed by the then-tour-de-force Hotel Budapest (György Szrogh, 1967) and the apartment blocks in the leafy area along Budakeszi út (László Iványi, 1969). The professional community as well as the general public received these

■ The Schönherz dormitory

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