Ferkai András: Modern buildings - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2009)
Rented villas of flats
the bathroom and kitchen walls open into the living areas with large blue slabs of moulding glass replacing the usual tiles. Opalescent glass panes hide the overhead lights between the twin rafters. Central heating is provided by an enormous tile stove standing between the central pillars downstairs. The flue runs along the wall in a covered parapet between the cupboard pillars, which became an integral part of the interior while heating almost all the rooms. The floor of the upstairs rooms is covered with Swedish parquet arranged in a herringbone pattern with a strip of glass tiles along the outside walls, while the downstairs rooms are paved with a mosaic of glass shards. The rooms were furnished with massive pieces designed by the owner. As the house is still tenanted by the family of the first owner, its system of spaces and interior decoration has remained virtually intact. Rented villas or flats The urge to live in a healthier environment launched a westward migration within Budapest. Whoever could afford to do so, moved from Pest to Buda, from tenement blocks in the inner districts to houses. Naturally, the process quickly drove property prices up in Buda. Plots in the green belt often proved too expensive for an average bourgeois or middle-class family to think of building its own home. The 1933 appendix to the Building Regulations was the first legislation to make provisions for the construction of semi-detached and terraced houses, which became one way of reducing per-capita plot prices. Another way of expense-reduction was building self-contained apartment houses. Where regulations provided for it, three or four storey high villa-style buildings were raised even in the green belt with two to four flats on each floor. When venture capital was used to finance the construction as a profit-oriented investment, then the resulting building was called a rented villa (or flats), while in the case of would-be tenants building their own homes jointly, then the name was villa-condominium. The areas where rented villas were characteristically built were Pasarét and its environs, Gellért Hill and Sas Hill on the Buda side with Zugló serving the same purposes in Pest. The finest specimen of the rented villa as a genre is possibly the one at 61 Szilágyi Erzsébet fasor, District II. It was built to plans by János Wanner (1906—89) in 1936 for architectural contractor Henrik Wanner, the architect's brother. Following his cousin Károly Dávid, he worked in Le Corbusier's Paris studio returning home to open his own studio in Budapest. He finished but a few build29
