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

perimental housing estate near the Gubacs bridge. In the autumn of 1955, after being redesigned a number of times, the conception indicated “the changing of our architectural philosophy". What then was the essence of this paradigm shift? The projection, the vertical axis, is no longer placed automatically in the middle, the projecting elements do not necessarily come in pairs for the sake of symmetry, and it is not only in orthogonal representation that they appear in tower-like formations. Links between parts of buildings are not mechanistic, and there is no more need for the surrogate connection provided by arcades. All credit for the transformation was given personally to Péter Molnár by his contemporary Dezső Cserba. He believed, according to one of his writings dated 1956, that the decisive difference in the (by then tamed) practice of Socialist Realism was that designing the fagade was no longer the only worthwhile creative act in architecture. The fagade could not be separated from the structural properties of the given building. The fagade “is already given in the floorplan, in the order of construction, in the overall concept of the building.” This is, however, not tantamount to constructivism, he adds - just in case.

New structures were also tested in the construction of the estate, for example prefabricated brick wall units or gas-silicate panels. Other buildings “assembled on the spot” were also erected on Fogarasi út. Why another apartment block, raised at the corner of Bocskai út and Daróci

School in the housing estate built by the Gubacs Bridge