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

Socialist and Realist both in form and in content, if it served the working man, doing which it should use simple, clear and reasonable means, “without [the work of architectural composition] a monumentality proclaiming the glory of labourers who build the country”.

It was at that time that the seeds of the polemic around the charge of formalism, implying that of retrogressive tendencies, were sown. This “debate” was one of the last stages in the process leading to the establishment of Socialist Realist hegemony. Even the government of the republic took a stand to influence the course of architectural history (Decree on the Construction Industry passed by the Council of Ministers, endorsed by Mátyás Rákosi), when it stated that “economical design is not treated as a prime consideration by the state planning institutes. Citing pseudo-aesthetic criteria [a roundabout way of referring to Modernism] they indulge in wasteful luxury rather than creating works agreeable to the tastes of the working man, works that are cost-efficient at the same time.” True, the expenses involved in using tailor-made plans and “guilds- men’s methods,” to erect mostly well-functioning, high- quality buildings fit to live in (constructing these would later be branded as “bourgeois luxury architecture”), but which could not be built by methods associated with “Sta- khanovite” productivity competitions, anticipated the untenable nature of the target figures.

At the end of the decade Imre Perényi saw the main reason for the presence of Modernism, aside from a wariness of the Soviet model, in the fact that planning was largely controlled, as late as 1948, by the private sector. The organisation of “planning factories”, mammoth design institutes responsible for the centralisation of civil and architectural engineering, commenced in 1947 when the process of nationalisation was getting underway. At the same time, architectural private practice was being phased out. This restructuring created a system of central institutions under ministerial supervision, which continued to function into the late 1980s.

We do not need any of those ugly tenement houses evoking the capitalist era, but neither do we want formalist buildings mirroring the capricious ideas of American designers.

(Extravagance, Szabad Nép, 27 August 1949)

20