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

Aluminium Research Institute (today’s Commercial and Innovation Park; 130 Fehérvári út, district Xi; 1949-50). Both were designed in a modern style.

Trade CJnion headquarters constituted one specific “type” of 1940s building. Even an ideology was fabricated in vindication of the type: “Each period of historical development had the characteristic buildings representing the age,” explained Gábor Preisich in 1948. “These proclaimed the power of the ruling exploitative class from ancient times to the decline of capitalism. The society progressing towards socialism has created such buildings meant to serve the working man as flats and community centres ... as well as those symbols of the fellowship of the working class, those reminders of its decades-long struggle, the trade union headquarters.” A veritable trade union quarter came into being next to the City Park.

Built to plans by Tibor Fischer Jr. and by reconstructing the ruined Park Sanatorium, the headquarters of the National Trade Union Council (84/B Dózsa György út, district VI) opened in 1948. The smooth stone covering of the facade is segmented by an even distribution of apertures, a balcony running the length of the first floor and a couple of supporting columns (in the axis of the entrance). Decorated with János Rozs’s mural of a worker-related theme, the side walls of the lobby broaden out towards the interior providing a perspective effect of increased space. The bronze statue featuring a young ironworker outside the entrance is the work of Dezső Bokros Birman.

On 4 December of the same year the Miners’ Trade CJnion Centre was inaugurated on Vilma királynő út (46-48 Városligeti fasor, district VI). During construction of the centre the ruined summer outhouses of the Lipótváros (Leopold Town) Casino were utilised. Designer György Szrogh used a skylight parabolic vault to connect the building's two wings.

The project of reconstructing the headquarters of the Commerce and Finances Trade CJnion (6 Jókai utca, district VI) was “determined,” in contemporary jargon, “by the social and political role” of the organisation (Iván Gyárfás, Pál Vince, 1949-50). With its interior courtyard, the ruined Eclectic building was a typical example of a Pest slum tenement. The “magnificently” simple mass of the two new street-side facades created in the reconstruction obliterated every visual reminder of the old building. “A forceful counterpoint to the row of windows overlooking O utca is

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