Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
struck between the masses of the buildings and the courtyards, and the arcaded corridors lend a friendly appearance to the courts overshadowed by. the trees, which have grown fairly large by now. The housing estates along Kerepesi út and nearby Nagy Lajos Király utca (by Vilmos Henk and Zoltán Vidos, 1953-55) were built on a human scale with a clear and urban spatial arrangement. They continue to function well and, what is more, they have a unique atmosphere-which can hardly be said for the prefab housing estate built across the street on Füredi út some 10 to 15 years later. The experimental housing estate in Óbuda Dwarfed by the brutal Óbuda Housing Development of the 1970s and made to look shabby and obscure by the shopping and entertainment mall built in Bécsi út in 2000 as it is, the small Óbuda Housing Estate probably qualifies-with its less than three dozen houses-as the most remarkable experiment of the decade following 1956. It played a role similar to that of the 1957 Hansa Quarter in West Berlin, functioning as an exhibition of the homes regarded as the most progressive of their type. The difference is that while the Hansa-Viertel was an international exhibit organised with the participation of a world-famous architect (with a political tendency made quite obvious by the bisecting of Berlin), the Óbuda Experimental Housing Estate was a single-nation project. Its purpose was also much more pragmatic in that it was a testing ground of standard designs for future projects on a truly large scale. The government that was formed after the crushing of the Revolution announced an ambitious programme of creating new homes, proclaiming as its objective to build no fewer than one million flats ■ Development plan oj) the Óbuda Experimental Housing Estate (Albert Kiss, János, Pomsár, 1958) 55
