Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

barrack buildings where the Crown Guards had been quartered (Ede Fekete et al.; No. 33 Attila út, district 1). Decreasing the interior height of the storeys, the designers increased the number of floors by one, to which they added a top-level, setting it back to form a terrace. With this the form of the building was made to harmonise with the reconstruction, supervised by Zoltán Kosa, of the apartment block originally built in the adjoining Hadúr utca for the National Institute of Social Security (OTI) in the 1910s to plans by László Vágó (35 Attila út). Virtually the mirror image of the one in the north, the reconstructed building in the south of the square is another block containing flats with a living room and one or two bedroom-cubicles, which apartments were converted from the various rooms of the former barracks, by reducing, once again, the interior heights and adding a top floor. The dining alcoves were placed, Swedish-style, between the kitchen and the window overlooking the street (Péter Demján et al., 31 Attila út).

No sooner had the building at No. 6 Marx tér (today Nyugati tér) been completed (1946-47) than it was submitted to harsh criticism. The restoration of the apartment block was carried out to designs prepared in 1945, which altered even the floorplan. The new appearance the building received after the old mock-Renaissance ornaments had been removed, was described as an “architectural fiasco”. The division of the arched fagade, a prominent feature of the cityscape, into three projections, the further reduction of the small old apertures in the wall, the heightened solidity of the wall surface, and the “primitive” manner of allotting sections of plaster coverage failed to meet standards that “should be applied” said a review in a contemporary professional journal. (Not long afterwards all this would perfectly satisfy the official tastes.)

Construction work on a larger scale commenced in manufacturing industry, which had been badly damaged in the war. Huge factory units were built in the country’s nationalised heavy industry - first and foremost the six- storey engine workshop of Ganz Electric Appliances Factory. The largest industrial building of the period was constructed to plans by Gyula Mátray (Gottwald) and Johanna Wolff between 1 August 1947 and 20 August 1948 on the company’s Lövőház utca premises in district II. Mátray designed many more industrial buildings. It was in this, industrial, division of architecture that prefabricated sup10