Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
dent his or her desk, and the husband a seat where, having returned from work, he can sit down, legs crossed, to have a chat with the wife and the children while looking out of the window over the well-positioned sill at the trees standing against a sky tinted pink by the setting sun, and where he can, if he so wishes, do some quiet reading or writing, or can play music while his wife makes, relatively effortlessly, dinner in the kitchen, later to turn in when exhausted after her work, without having to disturb the life of her family by obliging them to fall silent, in the bedroom where she will be greeted by the rays of the rising sun when she awakes in the morning. And I could continue in this key indefinitely... The architect should go so far in thoughtfulness as to determine the place of each piece of furniture so that the space left empty in between will suffice for the normal activities of daily life. ” In reality, the tenants of the detached multi-storey building by the Danube (on the embankment section called Mónus Illés rakpart at the time) who were interviewed by Szabad Nép said that the appointment of the flats, the size of their rooms were to their satisfaction, even though it would have been preferable to have the larder, rather than the WC, next to the kitchen, but the window-frames warped, the floor had got bumpy, and there was no hot water between the fourth and the eighth floors. The flat roof leaked, the plaster peeled off, there were no brackets for flags and a public phone box was also badly missing. Article 53 of legislation No. XX, 1949 declares that “the People’s Republic of Hungary effectively supports [...] such art as presents the life and struggles of the people and affirms the victory of the people ...". A puritanical facade evoking the spirit of Bauhaus offered little to meet such criteria. The words of the law cited here had been lifted from the manifesto of the 12 June 1948 party congress uniting the MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) and the Social Democratic Party; the document announced that the Party (consolidated as Hungarian Worker's Party) rejected the reactionary, bourgeois philosophy of “art for art’s sake’’ and called for a high quality art describing reality, i.e. the life and struggles of the people, an optimistic art which pursued truth and proclaimed that popular democratic ideals would prevail. Here is how Perényi interpreted the implications of this 23
