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

Housing Estates after 1945

from the way the area was to be developed to standard floor plans and built-in furniture to structural designs. The prize-winning designs (the "Shell House" by Aladár and Viktor Olgyay and "Modulus” by Lajos Gádoros, György Gerle, László Málnai, Károly Perczel, Imre Perényi and Gábor Preisich) broke with the house-with- a-garden pattern of pre-war times in favour of self-standing ribbon-houses and point-blocks placed in a landscaped area. Including everything from designs for small studio-flats to three-room apartments for families of six, the floor plans in the modules met every possible demand. The Olgyay brothers employed the concrete shell texture-structure of the prominent structural designer Sámsondi Kiss, while the other team recommended an iron structure with prefabricated wall units made of concrete. A small team of architects (András Ivánka, the Olgyay brothers and Gábor Preisich) combined the best ideas of both tenders in 1947 for a comprehensive design for a Magdolnaváros estate, but the completed work was never used. The Olgyay brothers emigrated, while Gábor Preisich was first appointed director of the Budapest Office of Architectural Design (FÓTI), then Chief Architect of Budapest. Nevertheless, the real reason why the project fell through is more likely to have been economic and political in nature, rather than personal.

With the country brought into the Soviet sphere of dominance, the communist takeover was completed by 1948, and the construction of a party-state together

■ Apartment blocks on Béke út

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