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

on the history of architecture, of what was destroyed by the war and in its aftermath. Let us see what Budapest lost in the more than six-week siege of the city. The battle was among the longest and fiercest of its kind in World War II. Beyond sustaining severe material losses (such as the demolition of the city’s bridges or the catastrophic destruction of housing facilities), Budapest gradually lost, not to be recovered for decades, the architectural traditions and quality standards in construction which had characterised, as late as 1942^43, such buildings as Gedeon Gerlóczy’s apartment house (12 Petőfi Sándor utca-6 Párisi utca, district V). Due to its “streamlined” fagade set back to form a terrace and so make the street feel more spacious, its passage topped with a glass and concrete skylight dome, the fine materials used, and the relief-decorated stairwell, the building was a specimen of genuine “metropolitan architecture”, to use the words of Virgil Bierbauer (Borbíró), editor of Tér és Forma (Space and Form), in 1944. Also lost were many of the city’s historic buildings, including the row of hotels and the Lloyd Palace on the Pest-side Danube embankment. The architectural principles embodied in buildings such as the Gerlóczy House were exiled from the industry’s philosophy within a few years of 1945. Meanwhile, the style characterising the hotel row in the area stretching from the Chain Bridge to Elizabeth Bridge (a group of buildings designed by Hild, Pollack, and Zitter- barth and representing, on a European standard, Hungarian architectural classicism, pieces of which were still in existence and perhaps even salvageable at the time) would later become a model for the Socialist Realist canon.

Flowing around me are the powers of creation. I live in the workshop of gods. My home is in a beautiful city. That it is surrounded by ruins? ... Now I know how the myths of old were born. They were born when a man took a hammer in his grip.

(László Cs. Szabó, The Serenade of FIercules, 1946)

Although rubble clearance and reconstruction started as soon as the siege was over, the seriousness of the situation is indicated by the fact that 1948 was still predominantly devoted to repairing the damage. 1946-49 was a period of transition in the history of Hungarian architecture since, besides the ongoing reconstruction and restructuring work, the first new buildings were also erected in a style

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