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

storeys and wrought-iron fittings, contain six flats on each of their floors opening from sky-lit stairwells. The designer (Zoltán Kiss) attempted to make this dual block blend into an environment whose character was determined by the villas flanking Sztálin (today Andrássy) út at the same time as complying with requirements specified by the commissioning authority. With its impressive nature and its exterior and interior design, which can be both said to be elegant given the constraints imposed by circumstances, the double building is one of the finer works of 1950s architecture.

1955, the tenth anniversary of the country’s liberation, presented the profession and the political leadership with an obvious opportunity to take stock of what had been done. It was in that year that Gyula Rimanóczy was giveh the Kossuth Award mainly in recognition of his having designed building R of the Budapest University of Technology, the section housing the drawing studio (Műegyetem rakpart, district XI). Planned to be 135 metres long, the building, in its style evocative of the Scandinavian Romanticist-Classicist architecture of the 1910s and 1920s, was not entirely completed, but its interior spaces deserve special mention (this was the feature commended in the citation of the award). Although in its details the work fully answers contemporary expectations, the grandiosity and uniqueness of the spatial arrangement of the staircase raises it above the standards of the fifties (associate designer János Kleineise!, 1951-55).

Buildings of BME (Budapest University of Technology)

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