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

Building homes in large numbers is characterised, in the era of constructing Socialism, by tenement blocks designed by our architects working in “type designing teams”; the blocks, whose layout is arranged in various configurations, can represent a higher or lower degree of artistic aptitude.

(Home Builders’ Conference, January 1955)

As mentioned above, building flats and housing estates became the focal issue of construction-related policies from 1953 on. Architectural theory also concentrated on the question of residential areas. In his work A városok lakóterülete (The Residential Areas of Cities) Perényi “built up" the hierarchic organisation of units within a city’s housing district (plot, block of buildings, neighbourhood, district) describing the characteristics of each. A plot in a capitalist city was of an object of private property and speculation, while it was communally owned in a Socialist city. A block of buildings tended to be a chaotic conglomeration in capitalism, being a planned and consciously arranged set of buildings in Socialism which, bordered by streets, formed an organic unit of the city. The size of a neighbourhood (or residential unit, as Pál Granasztói had referred to it in 1948) is based on the elementary school, that most important institution of child-rearing. The area and population of a district or city quarter is of a magnitude that requires the self-contained machinery of communal life, but is still not so big that “those living in it should lose the sense of connection with a particular location”.

Although these principles were not realised in crystal- clear form in Budapest, mention should be made of the following, which were built in their spirit in the period before 1956: Fiastyúk utca, district XIII, 2,500 flats (Zoltán Boross, Mihály Gábriel, Tibor Gáspár, Béla Hegedűs, Vilmos Henk, Kálmán Jankó, Dezső Papp, László S. Nagy, Zoltán Vidos, 1954-55); Béke út housing estate, phase No. II, 1953, 250 flats (László Tarján, László S. Nagy).

A characteristic, although unfinished, development was designed by Zoltán Vidos and Vilmos Henk built on Nagy Lajos király út by the ÉM 42 State Construction Company. The history of the construction can be said to be typical. A contemporary account (Magyar Építőipar, No. 4, 1954) gives an authentic picture of the circumstances characterising the manner in which the large housing estates of Budapest were designed and built.

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