Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

After World War I

■ Contemporary view of the state homing estate on Juranics utca (Hermann Tscheuke, 1924)

the flats in the barrack-like houses-each with a single room and a kitchen- were meant for workers' families. The other government housing estate, built mainly to accommodate refugees, was constructed behind the Artists’ Colony in Százados út in Juranics (today’s Stróbl Alajos) utca. Its development plans made in 1919, the two-block estate was completed between 1921 and 1924. Standing at either end of the earlier, Eastern, block were three-storey tenement buildings flanking two-storey terraced houses with small gardens belonging to each in the interior courtyard of the complex. The Western cluster is embraced by five three- or four-storey buildings forming an openwork frame. These buildings are of a simple design, too, with only a few details suggesting the identity of the architects, such as the half-timber and sgraffiti motifs revealing István Medgyaszay’s authorship (4 Hős utca).

When the housing estates had filled up, the government switched to building apartment blocks in the interior of Budapest, and having completed a few buildings of a higher quality, it terminated its mission of creating new homes in 1930. From then on, the only duty in this area that it accepted as its own was the creation-with financial policies-of conditions that favored the construction of apartment blocks with the involvement of venture capital, and also helped to meet the demand for loans required by house-builders.

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