Museum of Ethnography, Budapest, Hungary, project: Napur Architect
Published in l'Arca International 170
The new building of the Museum of Ethnography in the Budapest City Park (Városliget) has dynamic yet simple lines simultaneously harmonised with the park environment and communicating with the surrounding urban area.
The gently curving lines enable the building to function as a gateway and a passage linking the city and the park. 60% of the structure is under ground level, and thanks to the landscaped roof and the transparency of the sections over the ground, the new museum is adapted to its environment in its scale too. The grass-covered roof area is a pleasant community space awaiting visitors to Városliget.
The trademark of the building is the glass curtainwall surrounding the landscaped roof garden, reminiscent of two intertwined hillsides, with a unique characteristic, consisting of nearly half a million pixels, a raster made by metal grid based on ethnographic motifs selected from the museum’s Hungarian and international collections.
The pixels were inserted into a laser-cut aluminum grid by a special robot, more than 2,000 of which are attached to the building. The small cubes were made up of 20 Hungarian and 20 international contemporary reinterpretations of ethnographic motifs.
The new functions and flexible spaces of the state-of-the-art museum building will facilitate the understanding of the historical heritage embodied by the collection as well as the various aspects of contemporary society.
Besides passing down this historical heritage, the realisation of more recent professional and research themes and perspectives continues to be among the priority objectives of the museum, as confirmed by its mission.
The creatively built spaces will open up new opportunities to communicate with visitors, enabling the presentation of the everyday objects, phenomena and ideas of the past and the present side by side.
Client: Városliget (Benedek Gyorgyevics, the CEO of Városliget Zrt; Lajos Kemecsi, the director of the Museum of Ethnography; László Baán, the project’s ministerial commissioner); Project: Napur Architect (www.napur.hu); Principal Architect: Marcel Ferencz; Design Team: György Détári, Filó Gergely, Holyba Pál, Nyul Dávid, Grócz Csaba, Mészáros Mónika; Interior Design: Czakó Építész; Support Structure: Exon 2000 Szántó László; Building Engineering: HVarC. Lucz Attila; Landscaping: Garten Studio; General Contractor: ZÁÉV Építőipari. and Magyar Építő; Photo: Palkó György
