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

The former CJVATERV (Institute of Civil Engineering and Design) headquarters

all those of the MÉMOSZ Headquarters and the Ministry of the Interior, became the most vehemently condemned specimens of the new, Modernist and cosmopolitan style in the debate on the state of Hungary’s construction industry conducted in the spring of 1951 and at the first congress of the Association of Hungarian Architects (MÉSZ) held in the autumn of the same year. In his summary, Party “cultural boss” József Révai highlighted what he regarded as the mistaken positioning of the first-floor banqueting hall in the MÉMOSZ building, denouncing its designers for transgressing against the principle of functionality. The broad corridors of the building he described as extravagant, comparing them to a “gentlemen’s club”. Of the facade he had nothing to say, having already dismissed the issue when, speaking of the “wonder castle” of the Fekete Ede Apprentice School of the Rákosi Mátyás Iron and Metal Works (10 Posztógyár utca, 1949), he had already stated that “if it answered the purposes of an apprentices’ home, one might forgo having a faqade altogether!" (It was another problem that the building had too much sunlight!)

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