Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
by Albert Kovács and Balázs Kovács in 1963. The plans provided for the construction of 7-8,000 flats for some 30,000 occupants. Although the prefab slabs imported from the Soviet Union had not yet been decided on, the designers counted on the use of mass-produced building material. They made recommendations for three standard types of building-eleven-storey slab blocks of flats and sixteen- floor high-rises coming in two forms-, self-standing towers and massive so-called "fat blocks". With the slab block of flats as the staple type, fat blocks were clustered along Tétényi út, and the towers were arranged in groups of three by the slab blocks. Etele út, turned into a dual carriageway flanked by paved footpaths and shops on either side, became the main axis of the housing estate, although the traffic was not busy enough here to require this kind of arrangement. The intersection of Etele út with Tétényi út was appointed the centre of the new quarter. As the springs feeding the Erzsébet Salt Baths lie beneath it, the 12-hectare area next to the east-west belt of this local centre was left undeveloped. The sporting grounds cleared out of the way of the construction were relocated here and, on its largest part, a recreational park, too, was opened. The slab blocks of the estate were arranged into rigid geometrical patterns, lining them up parallel, or perpendicular, to the streets or, where the street ran diagonally, in a saw-tooth arrangement. The community buildings (four schools, five nursery schools, and six creches were originally planned) were placed in the areas between the high- rises of the housing estate and the surrounding neighbourhood of detached and semi-detached houses. In order to open them up to the sunshine and to facilitate their construction (in fact, to have spacious building sites and long crane tracks), the buildings were placed at a fairly large distance from one another. That was how the characteristically loose—wastefully loose, as it seems today— overall structure of the Kelenföld estate was formed. "The designers aimed at a commodious layout and a well-balanced arrangement oh masses. The somewhat monotonous rhythm oh the prefabricated buildings is broken here and there by the inclusion oh tall towers, ’’ describes one rather generous review of the estate in the 1970s. The residential and public buildings of the Kelenföld Housing Estate were assembled mainly from the products of the House Building Combine No. 1. The establishment of the first Budapest plant to make prefab slabs had been decided on in 1962, and the technology was imported from the Soviet Union. The large-slab system was first meant to be employed on the Békásmegyer housing estate, but the Ministry postponed the construction of the former in favour of starting in Kelenföld before all other locations. The architects at TTI had to make a rush job of the new standard designs, as the nine-storey buildings planned for Békás64
