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

counterpart of Stalin’s. In the axis of this ornamental boulevard would be the National Theatre and a concert hall.” (Others would have liked to see the theatre building in Sztálin tér.)

What was realised of these comprehensive plans had been completed as early as 1951 - through the widening of Aréna út, Felvonulási tér (Parade Square) was created (architectural design by Béla Gebhardt). On the axis of Vilma királyné út, Sándor Mikus’s Stalin monument was unveiled and a tribune of honour inaugurated. This enlargement of the square was the immediate reason why the parish church Magna Domina Hungarorum, Regnum Marianum, designed by Iván Kotsis was demolished with explosives. (The route of official marches along here was reinstated after 1956 as the authorities insisted that the people wished to see the annual display as its own might and to gather strength for further creative work and progress.)

Twelve plans altogether were discussed in the conference. These were taken into consideration when, in 1954, the City Construction Council worked out its own concept, which was once again overwhelmingly theoretical in its nature.

On Muscovite models, a system of high-rises was planned, all the more so as one architect-ideologue of the era was convinced that building tower blocks was the “method” to be used in a Socialist city. It was János Bonta who provided a comprehensive analysis of the characteristic features and guidelines following from the construction of high-rises within the framework of designing a “Socialist” city. He placed the task in a broad context because the exemplary system of tower blocks in Moscow was not only an essentially emblematic feature of the capital city of the first Socialist country in the world, but represented “the main ideological centre of the entire peace camp rallying around the Soviet Cnion". The methods of composition in the planning process themselves were prescribed by the main objective - the tasks of architecture to help achieve communism. Consequently, the major characteristic of the composition was the systematic, hierarchic arrangement of terraced levels in the arrangement of masses, the forming of the silhouette given by the “stylobate [base] rising up in gradations”. From this shoots skywards the main bulk crowned in its turn by another set of terraces narrowing to a point.

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