Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
The turning points of the theoretical dispute provide a graphic illustration of where this process in art history departed from, and in what direction its destination lay. Although architects grouping around the journal Tér és Forma as well as those rallying around Új Építészet affirmed the philosophy of the new architecture, they were divided along ideological lines. Máté Major (a former member of the illegal Communist movement) declared in the manifesto, addressed to Hungary’s Architects, of Új Építészet: “We have to extricate the cause of architecture from the economic and legal restrictions imposed by the narrow interests of a social class. ... Let us speak the truth at last - architecture itself is permeated with politics through and through.” In 1947, he was quite uninhibited in his transposing the tasks of architecture to the sphere of sheer ideology, asserting his commitment to a dialectical unity of politics and architecture. The society and the city of the future, he claimed, can only be fully envisaged and translated into reality by the architect who is dedicated to the ideology of “progress”. In Tér és Forma, Pál Granasztói could still afford to counter Major’s stance and warn that architects served the best interests of the workers if they refrained from applying dogmatic principles. They should solve problems of construction rationally, as the idiom of modern architecture followed from the accurate recognition of the laws of statics rather than social ideologies. He tried to adhere to a pragmatic approach when explaining that “new, systematic planning” and prefabrication used in order to step up productivity could, under the given circumstances, mean no more than using bricks as building material. Inventive and sophisticated building technologies that were born on the drawing board at the time, techniques of prefabrication as described by buzzwords like “shell building,” “cellular flat,” and the modular system were far from feasible, given the available standards of technology (Aladár and Viktor Olgyay, Béla Sámsondi Kiss). 1948 saw the publication of Major’s booklet Theoretical Questions of the New Architecture, which already featured the subtitle Socialist Realism. The introduction was written by Imre Perényi, who announced, as a statement of fact that “Our new art is based on the principles of an aesthetic called Socialist Realism.” Although no authorised definition was offered in the book, Major expounded at the end of his text that the new architecture would become 19
