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

Housing Estates after 1945

■ Passageway across the meandering block on the Kerepesi út Homing Estate

meandering block have open side-corridors and mostly contain flats of a single room with a bed closet or of two rooms and a windowless foyer. The designs of these buildings, which can be seen as a local speciality, have often been criticised for the large number of corners, dark niches, ill-lit stairways and internal corridors. These shortcomings come from the fact that the designers subordinated the floor plans of the individual flats to larger considerations of cityscape and urban planning.

The political restoration of 1955 cranked up target figures once again, meaning that they could only be met by the reduction of floor space and comfort in the flats being designed. On the Kerepesi út Estate, two four-storey blocks of 160 flats each had to be built, consisting exclusively of reduced-comfort homes. Here the architects tried to replace individual bathrooms with the inclusion of shower-baths, and a laundry for each block. The whole unit had become obsolete by the time it was handed over to the tenants in 1955-59. Happily, the architects managed to avoid a heavy-handed approach with the fafade-the only reminders of the 1950s are the monumental nature of the composition and the closed-in effect of the fronts owing to their small windows. A fine balance is

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