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

Housing Estates after 1945

■ Újpalota: the cityscape today

variety of buildings than available ever before. The assortment of designs made by the architects of TTI (Tibor Csordás, István Selényi and Ferenc Callmeyer) consisted of as many as nine building types at the outset. Rather than designing entire buildings, they created standard section that could be combined into a variety of slab blocks, massive blocks, and self-standing towers of five or eleven storeys. Furthermore, they also developed a new type of three- to five- storey building with a freely-variable mass. These new products of the house factory opened in 1970 were first used on the Újpalota Housing Estate.

Újpalota was established eight kilometres away from the city centre, in the farmlands between Rákospalota and Rákosszentmihály, in 1970-75. Built on an area of 136 hectares, the 13,500 flats of the estate provide 60,000 people with accommodation. Instead of being distributed over the area in an abstract geometric pattern, the buildings were arranged along two streets crossing each other diagonally. Leaving the city centre, it is Drégelyvár utca, continuing as Nyírpalota utca after the street is broken slightly, that comprises one of the two major axes, with Páskomliget utca and Zsókavár utca-two streets funneling crosstraffic through the estate-being the other. Sculptured high-rises were meant to accentuate the street turning points (of which only the one with the water-tower in it was actually built, to plans by Endre Mentes, in 1976). It is of this central zone that Árpád Mester had the following to say: "It would be desirable to have facilities creating an urban atmosphere, iuch as colourful shop-fronts, attractive patios, cafés and restaurants, so that shop windows, rather than

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