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

Housing Estates after 1945

The Üllői út (Attila Józsefi) Housing Estate: the second development plan (1955)

hensive Plan was debated in 1953. Prepared the following year, the actual development plan (urban planning by Árpád Mester, Buváti; architecture by József Schall and István Salamon, Iparterv) made provisions for 8,000 flats (for 30,000 occupants) to be built on the site. In line with the Stalinist urban philosophy of the Rákosi era, the overall design is a rigidly formal composition with a dignified central axis and a cumbrous centre. The plan, however, was scrapped by history. At an architects' congress held in December of 1954, First Secretary Khruschev denounced Stalinist architecture for its archaic tendencies that made construction work expensive and obstructed the introduction of modern industrial technologies. After the First Secretary's speech it was unthinkable to build the largest housing estate of Budapest according to these now-censured principles. The Ministry then called for alternative development plans in an exclusive competition. The competition was won by the same Árpád Mester who had made the original plans, but now with a radically different, modern design. The rigid right angles were now replaced with an organically- arranged network of interior streets dividing the areas into five residential sectors. Each sector would have its own centre with a school, a nursery school, a creche and a shopping centre. In the middle of the estate, along Dési Huber utca, was to be the centre of the entire estate with a secondary school, a club-cum-cinema, an open-air theatre and a 400-bed hospital. (With few of these actually built, the only important public institution of the housing estate is now a Buddhist college called The Gate of Teaching.) Another important change is that the buildings are located inde60