Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Detached houses and villas
supporting walls. For the purpose he used the few centimetres-thick concrete- shell of his own development, a structure where the liquid concrete is cast between permanent moulding boards made of plaster. Of the shells he constructed perpendicular wall-sections or U-shaped "cupboard" pillars, which occupied far smaller spaces than conventional columns of reinforced concrete would. On the cupboard pillars he would then place twin shell-rafters, which divided the ceiling into larger or smaller coffers. The roof rested on the upper plane, so the electric and other cables could easily be hidden between the dual rafters. Used as ironwork to reinforce the concrete shells was a meshing of thin cords that was stretched taut before the concrete set. All elements of the supporting framework were tightened to each other, too - vertically and horizontally alike - to ensure structural integrity. The insulation of the flat roof was also wholly original: the horizontal surface was made precipitation-resistant with glass panes laid on a bed of bitumen stripes. The solution may well have served perfectly well in happier times, but in the last years of the war — what with air raids and the siege of Budapest — it did not turn out to be feasible, as it was very soon destroyed by the shock waves sustained. The shell-concrete technology and the supporting structure that was to be called "cellular structure" passed muster, though: machine gun and cannon bullets went through the house without endangering its structural integrity. Regrettably, the structural design failed to become a widely used technology after the war. When it came to large-scale housing projects, it could have served as a viable alternative to the more expensive and less flexible employment of prefab elements. However, it was unthinkable in the Soviet sphere of interest to use a locally developed system of construction, whose implementation required an exceptionally high degree of precision at that, when one could go and buy a complete large-panel prefab factory in the Soviet Union. A small group of young architects discovered Sámsondi Kiss' structures in the sixties or seventies, and they proceeded to use it consistently. Professor Mihály Párkányi also gave his name to the promotion of the technology, and most recently it was Péter Janesch who tried to make this exceptionally talented constructor known abroad, too, when he made Sámsondi-Kiss' oeuvre the highlight of the Hungarian exhibition of the Venice Biennale of 2004. A few words should be said of the also unique interiors of the house in Dayka Gábor utca. The first floor is almost wholly integrated into one single space: the "cupboard" pillars form a tartan grid leaving larger cells in between, which can be separated with sliding walls or curtains from one another. Inner windows cut into 28
