The Beauty of the New Modern Life and Technology The Survival of Socialist Architecture in the Budapest City Centre
The Beauty of the New Modern Life and Technology The Survival of Socialist Architecture in the Budapest City Centre

Summary/Abstract: In the last thirty years, a vast literature has been compiled on the legacy of socialist architectural heritage and its evaluation after the fall of the regimes. The researchers of post-socialist urban transformation often select for their analysis clear cases like a whole town built or re-built under socialism, or focus on full-scale cultural and administration districts created on the site of earlier ones or placed near to the old, historic core as an alternative, representing a new era.1 Such examples of new socialist cities or new city centres have been described and analysed in the case of Hungary as well.2 However, Budapest, the Hungarian capitol, was spared radical interventions, at least in its city centre. Right after the war, the participants of an architectural competition intended, in the spirit of a new beginning, to remove all the buildings left standing after bombardment along the banks of the Danube and replace them with free-standing modern blocks. This plan was never realised, because of the lack of money.3 The few new buildings erected in the inner city between 1945 and 1960 – functioning mainly as offices – were built on infill plots, meaning that they were usually not visually striking but were surely expensive.4 A deliberate and programmatic development of the inner city started only after 1960 when the master plan of Budapest was finally accepted, in parallel with the political consolidation following the failed 1956 revolution.

• Details
• Contents