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

OTI (National Institute of Social Security) office in Újpest

seven-story building occupies the entire length of a narrow strip of a plot lying in a north-south direction along the street. The building rests on a separate pillar-supported foundation protected from hydrostatic pressure by reinforced concrete sheets, because the basement of the building was sunk beneath groundwater level. The main fagade of the flat-roofed, top-floored building was decorated with greenish grey glazed tiles made in Hódmezővásárhely. The set-back sections of the fagade were covered with clinkers, unlike the sub-base, which has a quar- rystone covering, and the first-floor which features windows with built-in flower-troughs. According to a contemporary review, the building exhibits characteristic features of “the emerging architecture: simplicity and monumen- tality” (Andor Lévai and Jenő Szendrői, 1948-49).

The OTI’s Újpest clinic (30 Görgey Artúr utca, district IV; 1949) was also built in modern style (Ferenc Kiss, Tibor Mi- kolás, József Ránki). “Pushed back” to a spot at the greatest possible distance from the traffic, the building was erected on a narrow, triangular plot. The construction served “almost perfectly” the function assigned to it, in spite of the fact that several changes had been made to the original plans as the investment project was implemented.

With the opening, also in 1949, of the tenth-district medical centre (Pál Németh, Károly Benjámin, József Gily12