The paper investigates three projects of the Hungarian state design firm BUVÁTI: the Inner-City Shopping Centre, the Fontana department store and the Kígyó Passage, interpreting these works as mock-ups of capitalism, where a socialist society could practice and act out consumerism. Designed and built to converge towards a part-imagined West, these phantasmagorical visions of capitalism from the eastern perspective nonetheless proved to be unfitting after the regime change. The shedding of a socialist Eastern European identity and the immersion in a new capitalist identity demanded a change in the architectural setting, here depicted on the sociocultural, economic and architectural levels.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/archandurb.2025.59.1-2.2
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