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

lyén, Pál Borosnyai, János Scultéty; 45 Kőbányai út) the polyclinic, an institution already tested successfully in the Soviet CJnion, was introduced to Hungary. In his description of the building, Egon Payr set out to reject the unfavourable criticism offered by Imre Kerényi (Szabad Nép, 13 November 1949), arguing that the project is not guilty of formalism “expressing as it does the inner function of the building, whose spaces are well-connected, and where the large glass surfaces of the surgery rooms with the slim reinforced concrete columns in between represent logically the purpose of the construction”.

Other workers’ welfare institutions were built in the course of the three-year plan. Preserving existing sections for reasons of economy, László Lux designed the remarkable building to house the children’s home of the Kistext company (at the junction of Fáy utca and Kártoló utca, district XVIII; this has been rebuilt considerably). Designed in 1938, the pharmaceutical company Chinoin’s institution of a similar purpose was completed in 1947, on factory grounds (Gábor Preisich, Mihály Vadász). The dressing room and bathing facilities belonging to the MÁVAG bridge construction factory at Kőbányai út were in a newly erected building of fine proportions, which has also been transformed since then (Béla Hegedűs, József Körner, László Málnai).

First in a row of community cultural centres was the one originally named after Mátyás Rákosi (today called Attila József), which opened on 30 December 1949 in József Attila tér, Angyalföld. Planning work had been started before the war by Szabolcs Horváth, but the designs were completed by Elemér Csánk and his associates in the style of moderate modernism.

In the years of the pro-Communist turn-about (1947- 49) the narrow-gauge tracks of the Pioneers’ railway were laid in the Buda hills, and the central site of the Pioneers’ camp was constructed. “Characteristic of a nation’s culture is the fondness with which the authorities and society at large care for the country’s children. Through creating a Pioneers’ Republic, the people’s democracy of Hungary has demonstrated yet another sign of this fondness,” wrote Gábor Preisich, designer Tibor Weiner’s associate (the latter architect, having visited the Soviet Union, would later become the chief designer and builder of the new industrial town of Sztálinváros). According to a contemporary definition, the function intended for the “Pioneers’ re13