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

The new regime set itself the goal of creating a new government quarter, too. To the existing ministries in district V, two buildings to house the Ministry of Defence (11 Falk Miksa utca-7 Balaton utca; Béla Hegedűs, Jenő Szendrői; László Lauber, Jenő Szendrői) and another for the head office of the Ministry of Foreign Trade (Honvéd utca; József Körner, c 1950) were added. Meanwhile, “the appropriate authorities”, which were highly unlikely to have been architects, designated the ruined block bordered by Széchenyi rakpart, Rudolf (today Jászai Mari) tér and Sze- mélynök (today Balassi Bálint) utca as the location of the new Ministry of the Interior.

The buildings highlighted here were used as cautionary examples of what to avoid in the architectural “debates" of 1951, in which the years-long process of enforcing Socialist Realism culminated. On more than one occasion, the architects themselves denounced their own, earlier work executed in the Modern style. However, there were two representatives of the trend which were exempted from criticism. One was the terminal building of Ferihegy Airport, designed by Károly Dávid, which had been started before the war but was inaugurated only in May 1950. The other was the central editorial offices of the communist daily Szabad Nép (Free People; 3 Blaha Lujza tér, district VIII), whose side fagade featured a relief entitled Liberation and Reconstruction (András Beck, Jenő Kerényi, Sándor Mikus, 1950) until its removal in 1992.

The airport building

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