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

Housing Estates after 1945

of foyer and living room characterising the bourgeois apartments of the pre-war period. The floor plan used in the two-axis apartment building (by Tibor Csordás) is also of an exemplary arrangement, with a particularly elegant living-cum- dining room opening on a balcony on either side. The enlargement of living spaces was made possible by the use of built-in furniture in the kitchen and elsewhere (reducing the space required by the former by five or six square metres) as well as the elimination of passageways. The rooms could be properly furnished with nothing but light and variable modern furniture built for the purpose. The casual couches, the spindle-footed and trestle tables, shell chairs, and variable cupboards anchored to the wall-winning prizes at the furniture competition held at the time—the designs, that is, which were to set the trends of the 1960s in public tastes, made their first appearance here on the Óbuda Experimental Housing Estate.

The (Attila József) housing estate in Üllői út

As a symbolic gesture, the first larger housing estate of Budapest was planned to stand in the Mária Valéria district, a slum surviving from the Horthy era. The area had been designated as the site of a housing estate in a draft development plan for the whole of Budapest, and the original plans were made when the Compre■ The first development plan oft the homing estate in Üllői út (1953-54)

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