Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
although with World War 11 the plan was put on hold for a while, the dynamic post-war period of reconstruction gave birth to several new ideas. Alfréd Hajós himself hoped that now was the time to realise the crowning achievement of his career as sportsman and architect with the construction of a great stadium for the capital of Hungary. For years he produced design after design, and the authorities did in fact turn their attention to the issue of the stadium. The workers’ parties, the Hungarian Communist Party in particular, had often raised the question of building a “stadium for the people”. (The project became particularly urgent when part of the grandstand at the üllői út stadium collapsed in 1947.) In the summer, the authorities designated the construction sight as suggested by Hajós, whose ideas served as the basis on which the preliminary plans were soon drawn up. A year later, on 12 July 1948, the president of the republic Zoltán Tildy ceremonially cut the first sod on the construction site of the “Centenary Stadium”. (The name served propagandistic purposes highlighting as it was supposed to do the putative parallelism between the revolutionary ideas of 1848 and the unification of the workers’ parties of Hungary.) And yet Hajós and the other great names of old are conspicuously absent from the list of the new stadium’s designers. The planning that went into the five-year construction work had been done by young architects under the supervision of Károly Dávid Jr. By the mid-forties Dávid had come to be regarded as a prestigious representative of modern architecture (he was among the leading designers of Ferihegy Airport), and had a number of stadium plans under his belt. His renown, experience, relative youth and left-wing sympathies were the credentials securing him the commission. Senior contributors to the construction of the People’s Stadium included Pál Borosnyay, Jenő Gilyén, Tibor Fecskés and Zoltán Harmos-all of them young architects at the beginning of their careers. Plans were often modified, sometimes in a major way, in the course of construction. These alterations resulted partly from the architects’ novel ideas, and partly from the changing political and aesthetic expecta- tions-when they were not necessitated by increasingly 56
