Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
József Finta. The commercial and service centres were designed by Éva Spiró and Zoltán Jakab, and the city centre itself (which comprised a department store, a doctor's surgery, a library, a restaurant, a café, a cultural centre, and a cinema) by István Zilahy. Construction work started in the summer of 1965, and by 1969 all the slab blocks, three of the self-standing towers and the majority of the communal and commercial buildings had been completed. That was when people began to have misgivings about employing a single type of prefab building on such a huge housing estate. That was when the so-called "fat house” design (a six-axis type with central corridors), an earlier standard plan of TTI's, was successfully included in the product line of House Factory No. 1. Some specimens of this type were built at the corner of Fraknó utca and another few between Etele út and Bikszádi út. The last to be constructed were the high blocks along Etele út. Instead of being made with the originally-intended sliding shutter technology in the shape of seventeen-storey high-rises, these eleven-storey buildings were raised on a Z-shaped ground-plan (architecture by Ákos Kaszab, Lakóterv, 1975). A finer quality is represented by the first twelve buildings raised to plans belonging to the cluster of designs created for the reconstruction of House Factory No. 1. They include larger flats of a better floor plan with their masses and faqades creating a more impressive and varied appearance. Although the first of its type, the Kelenföld Housing Estate displays all the problems presented by similarly large-scale developments built later. From the estates of the 1950s, it differs in principle, from those of the early 1960s in its proportions. The dogmas of modern urban planning were yoked into an unhappy marriage with the interests of the contractor-under whom the architect was relegated to a position of lesser importance—and those of the investors in charge whose primary consideration was meeting deadlines set in the central plans. The proportions and location of buildings were adjusted to be of convenience to the contractors rather than to meet requirements of sound architectural design or sensible urban planning. (The longer each straight crane track was, the less it cost to move cranes from one site to another). Switching from one set of scales to another is a major factor in itself. The same principles of urban development can lead to a fairly attractive environment, as seen above in connection with the József Attila estate. But ten- to fifteen-storey buildings constructed in this way require an increased distance between the individual buildings, and such proportions are perfectly incapable of creating a sense of an urban environment. The residential structure thus emerging cannot possibly blend in with the existing texture of the city. There is an unbridgeable gap between the detached houses and small-scale apartment blocks in the neighbourhood with its well66
