MSZMP headquarters from centre to oblivion II. János Pál Pápa square 26, Budapest

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1 MSZMP headquarters from centre to oblivion II. János Pál Pápa square 26, Budapest built:1950 s original function: party headquarters current fuction: empy 3279m2 Among the buildings of the socialist era obviously ripe for recycling were the party headquarter buildings found in all major towns and cities of the country. Most of them have administrative functions now, others are office or commercial buildings. A few of them are vacant, like the former central headquarters of the Communist Party at II. János Pál pápa tér (formerly Köztársaság tér) in Budapest. The buildings numbered were used by the Volksbund from 1927, therefore they became the Hungarian Nazi headquarters after The Hungarian Communist Party inherited the buildings from them in The building complex was reconstructed in 1950 with a unified, socialist realist facade. The most famous event of its history was when rioters besieged it on 30th October After the fight that claimed several lives, the building and its surroundings were searched for days for the communists nonexistent underground prisons. After the revolution was crushed, the headquarters and surroundings became a memorial for communist martyrs. The party s successor, MSZP only moved out of the ill-fated office building in It was going to be repurposed as a hotel by a private investor but the economic crisis intervened. In recent months a huge scandal arose when the homeless people taking over the abandoned building found top secret party documents left there by the MSZP.

2 Olimpia Hotel a victim of mass tourism Eötvös avenue 40, Budapest architect: Zoltán Farkasdy built: original function: Hotel current fuction: empty, since 2000 surface: 3162m2 Zoltán Farkasdy, deceased in 1989, the year of the regime change, was an emblematic figure of his time, one of the dániás architects, a term used for emigrant university students studying in Denmark. In the last year of the war, in he was evacuated to Breslau as a university student. Later he went to Denmark where he gained experience in an architecture studio for a couple of years. This generation s experiences with Scandinavian architecture determined the development of Hungarian modern architecture after the fall of socialist realism, from the 1960s on. Despite using typical structures, the Olimpia Hotel clearly displays the rational, consistent but playful thinking that characterised Farkasdy all his life. In 1973 he was awarded an Ybl Prize for this building and his life achievement. The hotel was built at a major hiking destination in the Buda Hills in the framework of a national tourism development program. Its name refers to the fact that the Hungarian team prepared here for the 1972 Olympic Games. The 188-room hotel with a 100seat bar and 150-seat restaurant was closed after the regime change. The major challenge for reusing the building is the fixed 2.7 metre room width due to the cast concrete structure.

3 SZOT Hotel Budapest s ugliest skeleton Vérhalom street 21, Budapestt architect: Vass Antal (KÖZTI) built: original function: Hotel current fuction: empty If there is a building from the socialist era that every person in Budapest knows it must be the Trade Union Council hotel over the city s fanciest district, the Rózsadomb. This notorious building has been standing there stripped down to its bare skeleton for over twenty years, just like the famous Szkieletor high-rise in Krakow. But this building had been used: the union vacation resort with a beautiful view of the Danube provided happy summer days to thousands of Hungarians from its completion in The building was quickly privatized after the regime change, the new owner wanted to make it into a luxury hotel but ended up going bankrupt amidst a national scandal, and the fate of the building is still uncertain. The economic crisis in 2008 put an end to the latest renovation attempts.

4 Downtown department stores commerce s dead main street Rákóczi avenue, Budapest architect: various built: 1926 original function: department stores current fuction: demolished, bookstore, hypermarket, empty The axis of Kossuth Lajos utca and its continuation, Rákóczi út leading to Keleti railway station became the capital s number one shopping street between the two World Wars. This title was achieved through legendary shopping institutions such as the Guttmann department store, the Holzer fashion house, the Hungarian Fashion Plaza or the Corvin department store of Hamburg ownership erected at Blaha Lujza tér in The nationalizations in 1948 and 1949 only changed ownership, the stores the ones that had survived the war remained in their place. The Guttmann became Verseny (Competition), the Holzer became Úttörő (Pioneer), and the Corvin, hiding its neo-baroque facade behind a luxaflex aluminium cover, became neighbours with the Lottó, Csillag and Otthon department stores. Department store business started to decrease along with the slow transformation of consumer habits and the increasing number of privately owned boutiques and shops in the eighties, and it collapsed for good when shopping malls started cropping up in the 1990s. Of the six former department stores of the Rákóczi út axis, only the Corvin is still in business. The Úttörő was demolished, and the Lottó s site was replaced by a clothing store until recently. The building of the Verseny department store became a bookstore, the Csillag a Tesco Expressz hypermarket, and the Otthon remains empty to date.

5 Domus department store aiming for a western level Róbert Károly Boulevard. 67, Budapest architect: Antal Lázár and Péter Reimholz built: 1974 original function: department store current function: empty he Állami Bútorértékesítő Vállalat (State Furniture Retail Company) was founded in 1949, and in 1974 it began constructing separate furniture stores under the name Domus. The first and largest member of the chain, which had 16 stores at its peak, is a much talked-about innovative example of the era s Hungarian architecture. The large-span floor structures concealed flexible, easily transformable spaces. The main facade looking over the high-traffic Hungária körút was adorned with a 48 metre long neon sign. The cantilevered facade clearly shows the influence of the Whitney Museum of Art ( ) in New York designed by Marcel Breuer, an architect of Hungarian descent; the designers never denied this. Interestingly, this parallel had a positive effect on the building s reputation; West Germany s Deutsche Bauzeitschrift published a two-page article on the department store, and in 1975 the designers received level III of the Ybl Miklós Prize, the most prestigious award in Hungarian architecture. However, typically for the quality of the Hungarian construction industry of the time, pieces of the mosaic covering of the facade began to fall after only 6 to 8 years, therefore it had to be replaced. The Domus started its decline after the regime change, and the department store on Hungária körút closed its gates in The building, standing on a valuable plot, was declared a locally protected monument by the district s local government, protecting it from the threat of immediate demolition, but there are no plans for its future.

6 Vending pavilions at the Óbuda Pilot Housing Estate a failed attempt architect: Marcell Kisszebeni built: 1960 original function: commerce current fuction: office surface: 40m2 After 1945, governments all over Europe struggled with the demand for mass housing constructions. We all know what solution most Sovietdominated countries found to the problem. Before the adaptation of house factories, however, a unique experiment was conducted in Budapest in the early 1960s: a housing estate was built in Óbuda, on the site of a closed brick factory using traditional construction materials and methods, with prototypes of different tenement buildings to be applied country-wide. The estate was built in two phases, completed in 1961 and 1965, with additional facilities including three one-storey, polygonal vending pavilions. Although the Pilot Housing Estate was discontinued, the completed buildings are still popular on the real estate market, primarily due to the quiet, calm neighbourhood and good traffic connections. Like the tenement buildings of the area, the high-quality pavilions were designed in a modern style but became vacant in the 1990s after shopping malls were built in the vicinity. Today all three are used as service centres and offices, for which they had to be significantly reconstructed.

7 The BNV s protocol restaurant a relic of an international Budapest Városliget, Hermina avenue 47, Budapest architect: István Kádár built: 1960 original function: restaurant current fuction: restaurant and bar surface: 40m2 The millennium of the Hungarians arrival to the Carpathian basin in 896 was celebrated with a colossal world fair in the City Park at the far end of the newly completed avenue called Andrássy út in The fair then became an annual event and was named Budapesti Nemzetközi Vásár (BNV, Budapest International Fair) between the two World Wars. During the peak of communism, between 1950 and 1955 the fair was discontinued, but it reopened its gates in 1956, presenting the latest inventions and services to visitors that were obviously unattainable for the average citizen. As part of the consolidation after 1956, the regime of János Kádár found the BNV to be a good place to create its own legitimization. Several pavilions built then were reutilized later, after the fair moved in 1972: one of them became a swimming pool in Székesfehérvár, the other a lookout at the lake Balaton. The big hall remaining on the site was reconstructed into an event centre. Only one pavilion is still in place and unchanged: the 40-seat protocol restaurant and information centre erected in 1963 was spared for some reason. In the following decades it served the neighbourhood s population as a cheap bar. The small building covered with a flashy concrete shell that looks like a fivepoint star from above has been operating under new ownership since 2006 as a quality restaurant-bistro, virtually in its original state.

8 MÁVAUT bus terminal the swan song of modernism Erzsébet square, Budapest architect: István Nyiri built: 1980 original function: bus station, until 2002 current function: design center, since 2011 surface: 400 m2 The centre of downtown Budapest formerly known as Erzsébet tér had already been named after Stalin when István Nyiri, a successful and sought-after master of the period between the two World Wars began working on plans for a new bus station. He was not working in his own studio as that had been dissolved: he worked as an employee of a state architecture agency. The building was designed in a modern style but by the time it was erected, the preferred style of the People s Republic of Hungary was socialist realism, therefore it received bad reviews. A vast collection of cosmopolitan forms, colleague Gábor Preisich faked disapproval in his introduction to satisfy political demands. The bus terminal, with much of its original features still intact, is one of the major monuments of the short modern post-war period with its harmonic division of masses, the dynamic, tilted surfaces, huge window panes and light reinforced steel structures. After two new stations had taken over its functions in 2002, the Erzsébet tér complex, already listed as a monument, stood empty for years. The 2004 promise that the building will serve as a Hungarian design centre was only carried out in The building, now called Design Terminal, still has a few of its original furnishings designed by István Szabó.

9 Kosztolányi Dezső sqquare bus terminal an excellent example of repurposing Bukarest street 11, Budapest architect: Vilmos Félix built: 1963 original function: bus station, until 2004 current function: coffee house, since 2004 surface: 150m2 Owing to the legendary buses manufactured by the Hungarian bus factory Ikarus, founded in the spirit of cooperation between Comcon countries, intercity buses caught up to trains in Hungary s public transportation in the 1960s. New bus terminals were constructed in several major cities over the country (Szeged, Veszprém, Eger, Székesfehérvár, Kecskemét, Kaposvár) and on Budapest s western bank. The look of the buildings is dominated by the spectacular roofs of waiting areas, typically made of prestressed concrete structures in accordance with the international trends of the era. After losing its original function, the bus terminal constructed at Kosztolányi Dezső tér in Buda was repurposed as a café-restaurant in Attila Borsay (MCXVI Architects) redesigned the building keeping the original structure and most of the materials and decorations, but in a practical and consistent manner, in his own words, regarding it as an object: separated from both current architectural trends and monument renovation principles.

10 KÖKI public transport junction the rise and fall of plastic Road leading to Ferihegy Airport, Kőbánya-Kispest architect: György Kővári built: 1980 original function: subway station current function: partly demolished The construction industry s great innovation in the late 1970s was the use of prefabricated plastic facade panels. György Kővári of MÁVTI, the state institute responsible for railroad buildings was one of the major prophets of this technology. After his seven-story building covered with red plastic in Szondi utca, his most significant work with this technique is the KőbányaKispest intermodal junction in southern Budapest, known by the abbreviation KÖKI. The building connects the metro, the railroad and the neighbouring bus station; its red metal structure is paired with blue walls, orange and yellow plastic panels and red window frames. The building is unusually colourful for socialist aesthetics, its construction was probably made possible by the success of metro line number 3 terminating here, with stops designed based on the colour dynamic plans of Antal Nemcsics, a professor of the Budapest University of Technology. The KÖKI, however, met its fate arising from a lack of maintenance. By the late 1990s it became notoriously worn-down, therefore when they recently began demolishing it for the construction of a mall nobody raised any objection to its destruction. Only a part of the original structure is still standing. A group of artists wanted to use the plastic panels taken off the building as a gondola at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, but they did not gain the support of the Hungarian commissioner.