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

Housing Estates after 1945

with a centrally administered, planned economy was begun. During the Cold War, the country's economic resources were channelled to newly-developing centres of heavy industry. Well under way in 1948, Budapest’s housing projects were halted around 1950, not to be given another impetus before 1953, when a new economic drive under Prime Minister Imre Nagy was launched. Lying in the vicinity of the industrial belt in Újpest and along Váci út, the Angyalföld district was officially regarded as a working-class area, whose development remained a top priority. Nevertheless, construction work progressed at a slower rate and along different lines than it had done before. The construction industry had been nationalised in the meantime, and self-employed architects had been herded into large architectural bureaus. The planned economy required norms and standard designs whose development was left to designers’ companies specialising in one area or another. The authority of Lakóterv (Housing Designs) and TTI (Institute of Planning and Standard Designs) extended to the entire country, while FőTl-Buváti was in charge of the capital.

The Angyalföld constructions were continued along Béke út. Development plans for the strip up to Fiastyúk utca were prepared by Ervin Schömer (Buváti), who made use of Dezső Cserba's (Lakóterv) designs for eight-storey blocks. Approving the overall design, the Ministry in charge invited new competitive plans for the fagades. Now that should give us pause. Why would such an office reject a design on aesthetic grounds? one may well ask. The answer is that this, too, is a sign of the times. The dictatorial system erected under Stalin took charge of all walks of life. Matters of style became political issues. By 1950, architecture had come to be the last stronghold of Modernism. In the other arts, followers of Western "bourgeois decadence" had duly been denounced, with Socialist Realism remaining the only style officially endorsed. As architecture was an obvious means of propaganda on a monumental scale, it was only natural for the authorities to demand that it, too, promote the achievements of engineering a new society. The fagades of the Béke út estate were deemed far too functional; a more monumental composition was expected from the architects. "I see the fapade jjor Schömer and Cserba’s apartment homed on Béke út deiigned by myself) in collaboration with Ládzló Tarján ad a desperate attempt at Socialist Realism," confessed Zoltán Vidos, looking back on his prize-winning design from the year 1954. ''Mitigating the Odense is the fact that at least we retrained from the use of external ornaments in creating the central local point,’’ he added. And indeed, their design did not transcend the boundaries of a Modernist philosophy; all they did was to regroup the essential elements (balconies, roof superstructure, arcaded passageway) to shape the whole build49