Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
The Civil Servants' Estate
workers' housing estate in Zugló, but the membership insisted on having self- contained, villa-style buildings. That was how fully detached houses were built eventually-thirty-two in 1910-11, with another ten the following year, bringing the total up to forty-two. On individual request, the houses, equipped with all conveniences and accessible either from an open porch or a closed verandah, consisted of a three or four-room apartment with a bathroom, and a cellar; the larger buildings contained a basement flat for the janitor, too. Although most of the houses were constructed on a few standard designs, houses of the same ground plan were not necessarily identical. The roof and the gable came in different shapes, and those little details and ornamental features that have disappeared by now also varied from house to house. Some of the detached houses were really spacious and richly-decorated affairs (those at 14,22 and 29 Gervay utca). Despite the wealth of form, the whole estate impresses one with a very definite and unified architectural character. That is partly due to the repetition of certain identical features (wooden eaves-brackets, gable-windows, brick vaults, emphatic chimneys), partly to the architect's individual style. All the buildings were designed by Kornél Neuschloss-KOsli, an architect of Swiss descent, who had studied art history at the Pest University of Arts and Sciences. His two best-known works are the main entrance and the pachydermic department of the Budapest Zoo. It may not be entirely coincidental that his Zugló houses suggest a distant ■ Reconstructed house on the Zugló patai workers' housing estate v'JH 1 w \ ■ LM '7
