Műemlékállományunk bővülése, új műemlékfajták (Az Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1987 Eger, 1987)

Nováki Gyula: Őskori és középkori földvárak Magyarországon

LÁSZLÓ PUSZTAI HOUSING ESTATES FOR THE WORKING CLASSES A book was published in Berlin in 1910 entitled „Das Arbeiterwohnung", edited by the German architects Karl Wessbach and Walter Mackowsky, and covering almost 300 pages wit 439 illustrations. The authors themselves were personally involved in the design of dwellings and housing estates for the working classes, but their work doesn't concentrate on this but rather on European examples. It is not only the topic of the book that makes it interesting, but also because it marked the end of a particular type of turn-of-the-century design and construction work, in a period when one of the most serious social problems was that of the lack of suitable housing for low-income industrial working class families. When considering the question of such housing estates in Hungary, I think it would be inappropriate to divorce them from similar developments throughout Europe. This is true not only form the point of view of the social problems that typified the period, and turned up in a particularly extreme form in this country, but also as far as their stylistic evaluation is concerned. Despite the fact that every country developed its own unique architectural features, the common functions of the buildings lead to many similarities. Not long after the apperance of Weissbach's and Mackowsky's book, the magazine "Hungarian Architectural Art" published a special issue, edited by Gyula Kabdebó in 1913, entitled "Building Projects in the Capital, Budapest", a similar publication that restricted itself to Hungarian examples. It is no mere chance that we have mentioned this book, since it includes a sizeable section in which Kabdebó discusses and evaluates the workers' dwellings and housing estates built at the turn of the century. The author also discusses the features that differentiate Hungarian housing estates from others around Europe. Particular mention was made of the number of rooms, standards of comfort, settlement structure and communal facilities attached to estates, such as restaurants, public baths, laudries, schools, libraries, nursery schools, pubs, shops, and clubs. Many descriptions were prepared of the workers' housing estates built before or at the turn of the century, irrespective of whether they were built by an industrial company, local company or as a public works project. However it should be said here, I think, that the study of workers' housing estates is still considered to be a rather marginal area of historical and architectural research. This is almost certainly due to the fact that we are dealing here sith simple buildings, that lack the grandeur ofmajor public buildings or the high degree of ornamentation that typify buildings of the time. If we take a closer look however at these estates, we realize that they are as representative of the period as any of the major, well-known buildings. I should like to mention the fact here that there are a number of estates that have been retained virtually in their original form and were built between 1867 and 1914. The question of preservation has only arisen in recent times in the case of a few housing estates, where not only is the layout of the estate modern but the unity and artistic quality of the buildings is high enough to make protection obligatory. When we speak of Hungarian architecture of the turn of the century, then we should not fail to mention the historic precedents that are worth mentioning from a functional point of view. After the end of the period of Turkish occupation, from the beginning of the 18th century, a large number of mainly German speaking settlers moved into the areas rich in natural resources such as Upper Hungary (now Slovakia), and Transylvania (now part of Romania). From the middle of the 18h century, illustrations and town maps show that the new inhabitants, rather than settling in the abandoned town centres created separate settlements or KOLÓNIA. An etymological investigation of the meaning of the word reflects the fact a KOLÓNIA refers to a community of immigrants that settle in one place, creating a unified self-contained settlement. You may wonder why I felt it necessary to mention this. Not only have I done this because these KOLÓNIA formed the first distinctive workers' settlements, but also because there is a certain continuity between the two settlement forms.