Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Modernis stairways in Buda and Pest
cases. The prefab elements (24 thousand for the terraces and 15 thousand for the stairs) were made on location using up 2,500 tons of reinforcing iron and 45 thousand cubic metres of concrete. The investment cost as much as 160 million forints. The audiences gathered for the opening ceremony held on 20 August 1953 were entertained by 12 thousand gymnasts and more than two thousand other athletes as well as four hundred folk dancers. A lighting system making the stadium fit for night matches was mounted in 1959, and the terraces were expanded to admit crowds of 83 thousand. By now the complex renamed Puskás Ferenc Stadium has become obsolete with some of its sectors classified life threatening. The terraces can thus admit a maximum of 50 thousand people on the occasion of a major sports or musical event. There are plans of demolishing the building altogether, while other plans envisage its reinforcement and modernisation to be carried out in several phases. Modernist stairways in Buda and Pest Several works of lasting architectural value were made in the Budapest of the interwar period. Two apartment houses with their staircases of outstanding quality are introduced below, both built by the Hofstátter-Domány duo of architects. The architectural development of Margit körút in the 20* century dragged along at a slow pace, and that was in spite of the fact that the street had already emerged as "Buda’s boulevard". The lowest-lying slopes of Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) flatten out at Margit körút, where the old vineyards and peasant cottages held out for a long while, facing down the large apartments rising one after the other on the side opposite of the street nearest the Danube. By 1937 the building at No. 13 had been completed, and its enormous firewall made the single-storey houses in the expanse between Römer Flóris utca and Margit utca look that much more obsolete by contrast. Even the Board of Public Works kept urging that the valuable plot be built on. The property was eventually purchased by the Recognized Pension Funds of the Weiss Manfréd Works, which commissioned Béla Hofstätter and Ferenc Domány, two architects who had made their names in the profession by the time, with designing the building. The team was reinforced by László Wigand as interior decorator. On the sloping terrain the building was raised with split-level storeys, where the resulting mismatch in height is counteracted by the clever arrangement of access to the three flats opening from each landing. Complete with the cylindrical lifts placed in elegant glass shafts, the access area rising from an 47
