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

The Mayor’s Office in district II

his associates. After a series of extended deadlines, short “draft furnishing” periods, redraft orders, and in the overheated atmosphere of raised indexes in the five-year plan, but overshadowed by budgeting problems, on 20 August 1953 the 78,000-seat stadium was inaugurated. (The building was originally planned to have a seating capacity of 100,000, but the required extension has not been made to this day.)

Eighteen monolithic reinforced concrete columns, each hidden behind lattice-like ornamentation (and strengthened subsequently because of the poor quality of the cement used), support the giant stand in the west. Next to the earthen terraces in the east, foundations for six of the planned columns meant to carry a later addition were in fact prepared. However, the thirty-one metre high building containing dressing rooms, a structure intended to be the centrepiece of the stadium in the original plans, was not completed either. The lower section of the rusticated ashlar tower remained a three-storey torso. Across from it is the grandstand. In its design, allowances had to be made for security considerations specified by the State Security Authority. Thus an underground tunnel was dug, through which the political VIP's could reach the stadium from the nearby National Sports Hall. In 1954, Károly Dávid was given a Kossuth Award for his work. (His associate designers were Pál Borosnyay, Zoltán Harmos, Tibor Fecskés, Jenő Gilyén statics designer, and István Németh interior designer.)

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