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

The worker's colony of the Hungarian Railways

for, these units are variously called workers', miners' and railwaymen’s estates, or civil servants' and policemen’s colonies. (They can also be known as artists’ colonies, but these are not normally classed with the above.) According to the purpose and character of housing developments, buildings raised as part of a larger project tend to be more commodiously arranged; the housing estate was meant to be an alternative to the densely-populated quarters of the twentieth- century big city with its unhealthy and overcrowded tenement blocks. The idea is akin to the concept of the garden city. What sets it apart from the latter in its ideal form is that it offers no employment opportunities and has no central maintenance authorities. The housing estate is not a self-sustaining unit. All the types listed here can be found in Budapest. Due to constraints of space, we cannot survey all the noteworthy housing estates; the material had to be treated selectively. It was our intention to introduce the most characteristic or most interesting representative of each major type. Arranged chronologically, the examples are taken from the history of about a hundred years, beginning with the 1880s and ending with 1989, the year of the major change of political regime in Hungary.

The first urban architectural assemblies that can be called housing estates came in two major forms. One type was built by state-run companies for their employees, the other built by civil servants for themselves. Of government enterprises, the Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) played a pioneering part. The one or two-storey quadruplexes were constructed to a standard design. It is not, however, these familiar buildings with a front garden that we will now examine, but instead another workers’ colony of relevant interest.

The workers’ colony of the Hungarian Railways

This housing estate was built by the Machine Factory of the Hungarian Royal Railways (Mávag) when the extension of its plant at the beginning of Kőbánya út necessitated the demolition of the buildings of its earlier workers' colony. Intent on protecting its employees from the exorbitant rents of a sellers’ housing market, the company acquired the plots next to the plant and proceeded to build tenement blocks on its own. The estate was built to plans by architect and master-builder Pál Lipták. Lipták himself oversaw the project, which was completed in 16 months in 1908-09.

There are five-storey buildings flanking the longitudinal plot among Simor (today's Vajda Péter), Delej, Golgota and Szapáry streets. The majority of the flats overlook the front gardens on the street side, which provide some protection from the noise and pollution caused by the traffic here. The architec6