Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

One year later, in a publication reviewing the 1945-48 triumphs of reconstruction achieved by the Ministry of Architecture and Public Works, József Darvas, minister, was in a position to announce several specific achievements attained in Budapest (as well as elsewhere). Listed by the minister were the following facts: of the 73,000 buildings damaged in Budapest, 60,000 had been rebuilt. In the summer of 1948 the construction of three large, uniform apartment blocks had been started, which meant 130 new flats; another 276 apartments were meant to be given to the “working people” once the suspended projects were concluded, and in Csepel yet another, 96-flat, apartment building was also to be erected.

In spite of the small numbers, the minister envisaged the restoration of all buildings by the end of the current three-year plan (1 August 1947 to 31 December 1949) and, by the end of the successive five-year plan (by 31 December 1954), the complete elimination of housing shortages with everyone having the right to a home as a form of “public utility". Darvas, a member of the Peasants’ Party, emphasised that the initiator of reconstruction work had everywhere been the Communist Party.

After the siege, city planners believed that a comprehensive restructuring of the capital would now at last become feasible. They thought that when the ruins were cleared, a prettier, better, healthier Budapest could be built in their place. They set to work full of optimism: “there will now be a chance” to reconstruct the city, to “rectify the faults of the past,” for example to solve the problems of the area stretching from the Basilica to Kálvin tér and improve the way Andrássy út opens from the neighbourhood. But soon it had to be realised that emergency measures were unavoidable if life was to be resumed, and that plans for a comprehensive project had to be curtailed.

Rebuilding also began in the Castle District of Buda; one of the completed projects here was the radical reconstruction of the Ministry of Finance (6 Szentháromság tér) to plans by Jenő Rados. Seen as a most “sacred” duty, the restoration of the Kossuth Mausoleum had also been finished by the centenary of the Hungarian War of Independence (the materials used here came from the demolition of a statue of István Tisza, a prominent politician of the pre- 1918 era).

Among the more significant renovation projects was the transformation into modern-style apartments of the two

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