The clashing of in situ and pre-cast technologies—Western trends and local traditions in concrete engineering shaping shell construction in 20th-century Hungary

After a blossoming pre-World War II (WWII) period, the concrete construction industry in then-socialist Hungary existed in a relative isolation from the Western World during the mid-20th century. In this paper, we focus on the body of work of one of the then newly established state-owned design offices, IPARTERV, to show how the isolation amplified local biases. IPARTERV led the early, government-incentivized developments in column-beam pre-cast concrete construction for industrial applications and later embraced the re-emergence of cast in situ shell structures, which had gotten off to a promising start in the 1930s. We discuss how the preferences and international references of notable pre-war pioneers of shell construction (Istvan Menyhárd and Pál Csonka) impacted those developments. The then-emerging technocratic design approach and the characteristic popularity of the closed-form shell geometries in Hungary are presented from both a theoretical and contextual point of view. We highlight the clash between prominent engineers of IPARTERV over best practices in concrete construction. The outlined unique societal and economic circumstances make the conflicting, yet linked evolution of the Hungarian School of shell design and precast concrete construction in general a historically relevant case study on local biases and Western influences in the 20^th century.