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

Ferény exercised self-criticism, saying “it won’t do to point out that the plans were made in 1947-48. The basic conception was as misguided as the realisation of the practical details. Disciples of the Modernist style claimed it to be one of the finest specimens of Hungary’s post-liberation architecture [... yet] built as it was with meticulous craftsmanship, it is still fraught with all the contradictions which a work of “the new architecture” should, according to the very theory of “the new architecture", be free from. The work is, in itself, a confutation of the feasibility of the Modernist theory.”

Révai himself proceeded to discuss the building of the Defence Ministry in Falk Miksa utca to continue his description of Modernist architecture: “There is that oddlooking shoe-box outside the entrance. It has no function whatsoever, unless it is to obstruct light from the floors above it.”

A contemporary review of the ministerial building under construction in 1948 (on foundations laid in 1944) was diametrically opposed in its conclusions to those arrived at by Révai. The earlier criticism said that “the arrangement of the floorplan makes for a transparent and well-lit outlay of rooms, which is due to the central location of the corridors. (The stairwells have been placed behind the two side- fronts at either end of the building, whose floorplan is of an elongated rectangular shape.) The vertical axis of comDetail of an interior hallway in the MÉMOSZ headqoarters

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