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

Part of the dome of the Népstadion Station

pectations regarding the completion of the first underground station and its artistic ornaments. The building itself was pulled down in the sixties when it was superseded by a construction “better suited to its function”. It is only the character of the lounge below the surface which preserves something of the designers’ original intentions.

Work on the plans for the underground continued until 1956. The construction of a station building on the surface in Blaha Lujza tér proved to be too much of a challenge, despite the completion of several draft plans. Towering in the square, the building of the National Theatre kept “getting in the way” - until it was blown up in 1965, when construction work was restarted.

The history of the large-scale project to build an underground railway is emblematic in the way the work and its period comment on each other’s relevance - the aborted torso of a distorted era.

42