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

tecturally completed. István Nyiri’s original blueprint dating back to the turn of 1949-50 envisaged an asymmetric superstructure in Modernist style topped with one dome. The redrawn design featured a building with two domes - between these would have been a sixty-metre ornamental court with a fountain - whose structural frame had been erected by 1952. (Documentary evidence suggests that the dome-topped layout was also meant to serve as an airraid shelter, here as well as at the Moszkva tér station.) The opening ceremony of the complex was to have been synchronised with the inauguration of the People’s Stadium. According to the original plans, trains should have been running all the way to Kossuth tér by the end of 1954. Sztálin tér should have been ready for use as an air raid shelter by as early as 1952. Meantime, tunnelling work had started on the Buda side, too. The Pest-side subsoil impeded work, which is why experts thought it more feasible to gain construction experience through drilling the rock of Buda, where subsoil conditions were more favourable.

Realising the architectural complexity of the Népstadion Station was facilitated by the fact that rather than having to dig deep into the ground builders could use the opencast method of excavation. The “noble simplicity coupled with ceremonial classicism” characterising the construction required the installation of artwork both inside and around the building. However, to comrade Orlov, the Soviet architect decorated with the Stalin Award who inspected the site, the fact that the spanning of the surface lounge leaned visually on a glass wall was symptomatic of the “vestigial survival of cosmopolitanism.” The supposedly uniform composition of sculptures, reliefs, murals, and mosaics that were to be installed was meant to celebrate “the joys of our life after liberation” and derived their thematic motifs from the spheres of physical education, armed defence and the movement called "Prepared for Work or Fight”. The work of sculptors engaged on the ornamentation of the building was “co-ordinated” by Ferenc Medgyessy. (Pátzay’s Sports Rider, the piece that was to have been erected in front of the entrance, is now near the Buda end of Margaret Bridge.)

That the first trains could start to run by 1953 turned out to be an illusion. The unfinished Népstadion Station could only have had ceremonial functions like those fulfilled by the dromos of the stadium itself. No doubt “our working nation” entertained “justifiable” but unfounded ex41