IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

The research examines the modernist public cultural halls and centers built in Hungary in the decades of the Socialist Era, the 1945-1989 period. The state-led project started in the 1950s for “Homes of Culture”; these domains has been defined as inclusive, even democratic spaces with a certain modernist architectural quality– this special building type had been erected as a well-distributed normative infrastructure all over the country. The “Entrance Hall Experiment” introduced in Királyerdő Community and Youth Center, Budapest in the late 1970s resonates at many points with contemporary ideas of communal architecture and presents many similarities with the theory of third place by Ray Oldenburg (1989). Nowadays in our post-pandemic age the change in community-cultural consumption habits, need for open access gathering space can meet the actuality for redefinition of this tangible heritage. Are they still capable of hosting contemporary life? How to deal with these buildings when their condition is mostly outdated on the surface but persistent in structure? The research aims to give a short overview of the typological variations and to present dilemmas and solutions through a couple of exemplary houses, as the mentioned Királyerdő and Óbuda, Újpest, Nyíregyháza cultural estates. These projects are revealing the technical, spatial, and social challenges, possibilities of the positive interaction of a domestic community when thinking about a well defined, locally welcomed afterlife of such buildings, and the targeted quality of architectural heritage management objectives.