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

Housing Estates after 1945

■ The centre of the Kápoiztáimegyer Homing Development, Stage I

Árpád Mester and Buváti having been replaced by the company Lakóterv as the main designer of housing estates in Budapest. Káposztásmegyer was thus to be built by a new generation of architects inspired by the slogan calling for "a more urban city". The development plan was made by István Zoltai, and the individual blocks were designed by Zoltai, Zoltán Füzesséry and Antal Fekete. The design won the 1987 Award for Excellence in Architecture.

In the blueprint or an aerial photograph, Káposztásmegyer looks more like a city than a housing estate with its separate quarters, interior courtyards lying snug among garden-surrounded blocks on the inside, and street-like streets upon square-like squares on the outside. Streets and squares were indeed restored to their old status in Káposztásmegyer. With its more rigid order of perpendicular blocks, the first stage is still somewhat reminiscent of Ólipótváros and Új- lipótváros, while the second stage is more like a garden-city with its relaxed, sometimes picturesque, order of loosely-arranged curving streets and clusters of buildings. Both stages were designed with artistic care. The arrangement of blocks avoids monotony with delicate shifts, broken axes, changes in mass and height varying the composition. In the southeastern corner of Stage I, a monumental "town gate" is formed by a group of medium-height buildings, surrounding as they do spaces of a dignified atmosphere. With heights reduced further on,

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