Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

Housing Estates after 1945

as an architectural asset, is now seriously threatened. As early as the Kádár era, a period marking the latter part of state socialism in Hungary, illegal extensions and garages were raised on plots so small that no auxiliary building of any sort had been originally permitted. With the selling of these houses to the tenants after the change of political system, this trend was continued with the transformation of lofts into mansards and the building of vertical extensions over the existing roofs. Several houses were resold and the new proprietors could not care less about the uniform appearance of the terraced house of the street as a whole. More and more houses are demolished, too, to make room for palatial new buildings to be raised in their place. The problem is familiar from the Wekerle Estate-the houses are too small and fail to satisfy today's requirements. And yet, some solution is badly needed before the estate is forever deprived of its original character.

The garden city in Magdolnaváros was envisaged to have a centre with buildings arranged in a frame-structure. Of these, the ones along Göncöl utca were built in 1943-44, while those flanking today's József Attila tér were not completed before the early 1950s. It was also in the post-war period that the 1,800 room-and-kitchen flats meant for temporary accommodation, begun in the spring of 1943, were completed on the area next to the garden city. The broach- roofed four-storey buildings (development plan by Gedeon Gerlóczy, design by Károly Weichinger) all consisted of identical sections. It was here that mass- produced windows and prefabricated reinforced-concrete flights of stairs were first used. Of the 54 buildings, no more than 25 had been completed before the siege of Budapest. Construction restarted after 1945 on the basis of the original plans, and the buildings were duly completed one after the other. Even though part of the new Three Year Plan, it was on the existing foundations that six new three-storey slab blocks of flats were raised along Béke út (to plans by Zoltán Kosa and E. Deák in 1949—50). Due to the large expanses of vacant land south of Magdolnaváros, the area continued to be used as the site of large-scale home building projects in the post-war years.

HOUSING ESTATES AFTER 1945

From Magdolnaváros to Ernst Thälmann utca

In one of the first invitations of tenders in the years of peace, Magdolnaváros was designated as the target area of a new housing development plan. Announced in 1946, the competition asked for recommendations on just about everything