Prakfalvi Endre: Architecture of Dictatorship. The Architecture of Budapest between 1945 and 1959 - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
Payr) that would not even deserve plaster, let alone the expensive stone covering that they boast. The Miners’ Trade Union Headquarters by György Szrogh was also given its share of disparagement at the conference. ‘dust to make a motif-like allusion to a mine shaft in the shaping of symbolic spaces, the designers did not stop short at putting a shell roof made of reinforced concrete above the corridor-shaped lobby no more than a few metres in breadth.” Following all that, György Kardos, professor of contemporary architecture at the University of Technology, summed up the critical remarks in his opening lecture surveying the field. “The use of Modernism in the architecture of Socialism is tantamount to giving up on that privilege of art which constitutes its essence and its main power. We give up on its power to motivate, to enlist and organise society in support of the cause of building Socialism, on its ability to portray the lifestyle of Socialism.” Furthermore, modernist architecture is not even comprehensible to the people. The architectural conception of Budapest is naturally not a goal to be achieved for its own sake. It is a means to the end of expressing the specific significance of the city. (Gábor Preisich, 1953) Although few large-scale ideas of urban development were actually put into practice, the concepts of city planning fashioned in the period should nevertheless be reviewed here. The first comprehensive plan had been completed by the summer of 1948 in the Institute of Architecture and Design. It set itself the goal of assigning the location of planned investment, but it also emphasised the importance of local autonomy in the city’s outlying areas. The plan, which was later swept aside in the new situation that emerged in the wake of the party merger (12 June 1948), was described in 1953 by Gábor Preisich as the product of a transitory period. The retrospective assessment, made at a time when a new conception was being debated, highlighted the preventive function of the earlier plan, commending it for having “thwarted” the implementation of projects which would have been detrimental to the development of the city. The Hew Architecture Circle exhibited its concepts, elaborated in a larger context of the comprehensive plan 30
