Témák

The recently unified Hungarian capital of the end of the 19th century, like the North American and Western European cities, attracted a new workforce, including a large number of single people (both workers and middle class). A more accurate picture of middle-class single men living alone for long periods of time within the rapidly growing population can be obtained by analyzing more general historical statistics, as well as information from apartment advertisements and apartment floor plans. At that time, single women in the capital who were visible/perceptible in the statistics could not yet be considered as independent tenants (or apartment seekers). For them, studio apartments (in Hungarian, their name was ‘garçon apartments’, referring to the single men that usually occupied them) were a specifically forbidden element of the city, a threat to their reputation, and it was only in the years between the two world wars that renting such apartments became socially acceptable for them for the first time.

The new types of facades created through reform developments aimed at improving apartment quality, expanded and reinterpreted the traditional dual classification of street- and courtyard-facing apartments in the context of closed row housing with enclosed courtyards. Without changing the basic layout and conceptual thinking, various types of connecting courtyards transformed the meanings of street and courtyard facades, and garden facades, previously associated with free-standing buildings, began to emerge. This development affected the classification of rooms and apartments based on their street and courtyard orientation and introduced a new category for garden-facing rooms.

Until the early 1930s, a one-room flat was synonymous with a worker's flat, and this stigma was also carried by the small flats in the new tenements. In 1928, the year of its launch, in the magazine Tér és Forma (‘Space and Form’), Jenő Padányi Gulyás spoke of modern small flats as a type of housing that was to be built for workers as a company benefit and to have an educational effect. Five years later, the same journal published the plans of György Oblath and Gábor Preisich, in which the design duo replaced the old apartments of an Erzsébetváros block with a healthier, modern apartment block with ‘adequate daylight’. They also rejected the one-room flat as ‘inappropriate’, and only included a few studio flats designed exclusively for singles. Almost half of the 500 flats on the proposed site at the time were one-bedroom plus kitchen flats, which were found to be best replaced by two-bedroom flats. In 1936, Lajos Kozma came to the defense of the ‘minimalist’ middle-class flats. In his view, smaller living space ‘does not mean poverty or a disadvantage’, but rather ‘a planned idea’ for the benefit of the tenant.

As the concept of homeownership emerged on the horizon of housing in Budapest, a new alternative to renting began to take shape in terms of accessing housing. The promotion of condominium construction was built on emphasizing the advantages of homeownership over the disadvantages of renting. Proponents of the new idea saw the main virtue of homeownership compared to renting in the liberation from paying rent and the threat of eviction. They contrasted the vulnerability of constant rent increases and the threat of eviction with homeownership as an inheritable asset, which not only frees one from the burden of paying rent but also constitutes personal property, providing secure shelter under all circumstances, even for heirs in the event of death.
The construction of freehold flats that began in Budapest in 1907 had barely made the presence of this new form of housing noticeable in the city by 1910, since there were only six condominiums at that time. Housing conditions in the inner areas were defined by the rental housing system. This system was flexible enough to adapt to changes in family and household structures that came with life cycles: the transformations in a household due to aging or family events could be quickly accommodated by moving between rental apartments. The anomalies that fundamentally disrupted the housing mobility processes were brought about by the fixed property circulation introduced during World War I and the 1920s, that is, the system of government intervention in the housing market. On the other hand, the transformation of family composition within the framework of this rental housing system was also associated with extreme vulnerability, affecting the middle class as well. Such a circumstance could arise from the death of the family’s head, i.e. the husband, who was most often the sole breadwinner in a middle-class family, leading to the complete existential vulnerability of the housewife. This was the situation faced by the Bugsch family, where the death of Dr. Gusztáv Bugsch, a forty-four-year-old dentist, in May 1910 after a long illness, resulted in the emotional and existential collapse of the family with young children. The family tragedy was further compounded by a move, as the family with three children had rented a new, larger apartment in the autumn of 1909, which not only lost its function after the father's death but also became unsustainable.

A Villányi és a Diószegi út között az Elek utca, Tarcali utca és Ábel Jenő utca által határolt, illetve átszelt terület parcellázása és beépítése ugyanazon kertvárostervből nőtt ki, mint az Átlós – Lenke úti telep. A szintén közel hat holdas ingatlanegyüttes a Lágymányosra elképzelt kertváros létesítésének második egységeként került fejlesztésre a 13889, 13890–13896. régi helyrajzi szám alatt. A kezdeményező Holek Sámuel banktisztviselő ezúttal takarékpénztári tisztviselőtársaival és három építésszel társulva vette meg a fél évvel korábban már megszerzett ingatlantól mindössze egy tömbnyire eső területet a Herz és Beimel-féle ingatlankomplexumból 1908. június végén. A legnagyobb részt itt is Holek Sámuel vállalta a befektetés közel felére kiterjedően. Építészként pedig Löllbach Kálmán vágott bele társként a parcellázási üzletbe a befektetés egyötödének erejéig.

In Budapest’s social policy, the establishment of emergency housing appeared much earlier than the construction of small apartments. The primary reason for this was that such housing was created for crisis management purposes: initially to prevent the spread of cholera, and later for the temporary accommodation of those evicted due to rent arrears. These measures served the public interest (curbing the epidemic), but an important factor was that the construction of these housing units did not create competition with private enterprises, as the city provided housing for a segment of the population with precarious rent-paying capacity. Moreover, these emergency housing units were not a financial loss for the city, meaning they did not harm the city's taxpayers.

Although the construction of condominiums in the framework of social self-organisation and private enterprise had already started in Budapest in 1907, it did not enter the housing policy discourse of the capital at the same time. In the mid-1920s, discussions on housing issues in Budapest first articulated ideas urging the city to participate in processes that would transform housing, focusing on the concept of condominiums. The issue of developing freehold flats emerged in Budapest's housing policy, coinciding with the post-World War I restart in housing construction, the resurgence of housing cooperatives, and the establishment of new freehold flat building ventures. In debates over the direction of municipal housing construction, several urban policymakers advocated for supporting condominium construction, aiming to orient Budapest housing towards the condominium system.

In a triangular area located in Lágymányos, bordered by Villányi Road, Bartók Béla Road (then Átlós Road) and Karolina Road, the construction of two estates consisting of detached houses was started in 1907-1908. The two blocks of flats, located a few blocks apart, were not independent of each other: they were linked by their initiators, their building concept and the underlying suburban vision. Both were inspired by the principles of the housing reform movement. Criticism of tenement housing and the idea of home ownership formed the basis of the idea of a housing estate of detached houses on small plots of land.

One representative of the typical triangular blocks of houses bordering the circuses of the Lágymányos district is the block bounded by Kosztolányi Dezső Square, Bocskai Road, Tas vezér Street and Edömér Street. Its development was initiated in 1928 by an advocacy organization of the capital’s public servants. The development of the block took place between the beginning of 1931 and the end of 1938, on five plots, with five apartment houses. The result was a block with a connecting courtyard, with a large inner garden among the residential houses standing on the edges of the plot, similar to the opposite block on Kosztolányi Dezső Square (then Lenke Square). However, unlike the other Lenke Square block, its development did not take place in the spirit of the housing reform movement before World War I, but within the framework of the trend of building methods and floor plan systems that fit into modern architecture between the two World Wars: the spread of perimeter blocks and three-section apartments with an entry hall. Here, the forms of ownership were not formed as a result of experimenting with a reformer approach – which influenced the development of the other Lenke Square block – but were formed within a consolidated framework. Instead of the initial cooperative idea, the houses were realized based on home ownership, created on the basis of the 1924 condominium law.

In the 1910s, Budapest stepped almost unprecedentedly into the forefront of Europe with its social housing programme, followed by the first, ‘classic’ period of municipal housing construction that continued over the decades with minor interruptions until the Second World War. Thanks to these, the capital and the state built some 30,000 low-rent housing units. These tenements and housing estates were scattered in different parts of the city, not only in terms of their date of construction, but also in terms of their spatial distribution. This is explained by the limited number of plots available, which were large enough and easily reachable by public transport, and owned by the capital.
Two of the achievements of this housing era, which spanned more than three decades, stand out: the Hungária Boulevard – Százados Road – Ciprus Street area, and the Kőbányai Road – Pongrác Road – Tomcsányi Street (today Salgótarjáni Road) cluster of plots. A laboratory of its own was created on these sites, as the amount of free space available not only allowed the construction campaigns to subsequently follow each other, but also provided a space for the different types of housing that were simultaneously being built, providing shelter for the different social strata targeted by the projects.

In the first half of the 1930s, the number of housing developments fell sharply, and there was both an absolute and a relative shortage of small flats (the latter being due to excessively high rents). This again spurred the capital to action, which launched a campaign of small housing construction, aiming to create 2-3,000 new dwellings. The new economic conditions resulting from the Second World War eventually prevented this from being fully realized.

"Do you know I'm also looking for a 2-bedroom apartment? And somewhere in Buda. For the time being, since it will only be relevant in the autumn, I'll get my information from the newspapers. For example, at Horthy Circus, a modern 2-bedroom apartment with heating and a hall for 2,650 p[engő]. Nice, eh? That's 220 a month. You will turn crazy if you really start to think about it. And old ones are hard to come by. But I thought about the Tomcsányi's flat, because they're looking for a bigger one. It's 3 bedrooms, nice and spacious, but I don't think it's very sunny. They pay about 1,400. I think they'll be out of there by spring. You can ask Klári for the time being. Then I heard that there are modern houses in Biblia Street (District 11, opposite the ev.[angelical] church, very nice place!), public heating only in the bathroom (this is silly!), and relatively not too expensive, at least for us. A flat that would be suitable for us is about 1,500 p[engő]. It is true that you still have to count the heating, so it goes up a lot. The cheapest modern area is Thököly Road, Amerikai Road, where the number 7 bus takes you. I can't say it's very sympathetic to me, but after all, it's close to the Liget, and one just has to bite the bullet. There the prices of the aforementioned apartments are around 1,400. Of course, there are expensive places too, I've heard that in Retek Street, at Széna Square, they pay 2,200 for 2 bedrooms with heating."

(HU BFL XIV.210 Éva’s letter to Éva Paleta, 15 January 1941)