Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

frequent shortages, ln the summer of 1948 Dávid prepared plans-borrowed from Le Corbusier-for a horse- shoe-shaped stadium fully open on its eastern side in which the spectators could have accessed the terraces on slopes running up the two sides of the arena. This notion of a “stadium with ramps” was followed by blueprints made for a shell-shaped stadium with tribunes forming a full, unbroken, circle, but its excessive complexity would probably have rendered this remarkably elegant and dynamic structure unfeasible at the time. When the specifications of the five-year-plan were raised in 1951-the stadium’s originally planned capacity of 70,000 was now changed to 100,000-Dávid and his associates designed a small set of terraces to be supported by iron girders and built above the curving earthen mound in the east as a counterpoint to the reinforced concrete grandstand on the western side. This plan was later modified with the addition to the 18 pylons of the western grandstand of 10 more pylons of diminishing heights on the eastern side. Although the height of the pylons, also functioning as stairwells, was 30 metres on the western side and 18 in the east, these colossi of reinforced concrete were lent something like grace by the lattice-like ornamentation designed by Tibor Fecskés. That was then the plan which, although in a truncated version, was eventually realised.

Function was the principal consideration the architects bore in mind when building this emphatically modern construction, leaving no room at all for the application of stagy sculptural ornaments on the fagades.

But then came the party congress held in the summer of 1951, which decreed that destructive modernism was to be replaced with the progressive ideas of Socialist Realism. At the time the stadium was the largest single architectural project under way in Hungary which it would have been far too expensive to invest it with the required stylistic features. The compromise that was struck involved the preservation of the uniform modernism characterising the structure (whose harmony was but slightly disturbed by the Neo-Classical motifs on the cornices) with the main building and the sculptures along the parade route leading to it being made in an unmistakable Socialist Realist manner.

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