Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
kept private gardens and quiet side-streets on the one hand, and the high-rises towering above them in the no-man’s-land of the housing estate on the other. And that is to say nothing of the sociological, psychological and health issues associated with the village-size population living in each prefab building. The housing estate in Újpalota The best example of second-generation housing estates of the prefabricated type is the one in Újpalota. The large developments designed in the sixties (Óbuda 1965-72, Békásmegyer 1965-77, Zugló-Füredi út 1966-73) are not in any significant way different from the Kelenföld Housing Estate except in the employment of new types of individual design. (These include the improved "fat houses" and H-shaped houses of House Factory No. I, and, in Zugló, the Larsen-Nielsen- type buildings featuring central corridors, developed by House Factory No. 2.) Újpalota is the first attempt at giving prefab housing estates a more urban appearance. The engine of the project was Tibor Tenke of TT1, a young architect with a missionary's zeal for the idea that a housing estate should not be a monolith of environmental dejection. Tenke managed to persuade the Capital City Council to contract Buváti in 1967, with the stipulation that his project proposal made a year earlier be taken into consideration by Árpád Mester, an unchallengeable authority when it came to development plans. Contemporary accounts highlight the exemplary cooperation between urban planners and the authors of the standard designs for the buildings, which did much to improve both the overall development plans and the individual constructions. The plans of the housing estate were to be based on the standard products to be made in the House Building Complex No. 3 under construction at the time. The Dunakeszi-based factory was equipped with slab-moulds capable of producing units for a greater ■ Újpalota: the cityicape today 67
