Budapest, Hungary
Marcel Ferencz of NAPUR Architect and landscape architects Garten Studio have completed Budapest’s new Museum of Ethnography—a dynamic structure comprised of two angular volumes and a large walkable roof garden that functions as an extension of the city’s park.
The Museum of Ethnography has recently been awarded a 2023 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Napur Architect’s building is distinguished by a dynamic yet simple design harmonized with the natural environment of the park while communicating with the urban texture of its surroundings.
The gently curving lines enable the building to function as a gateway and a passage linking the city and the park.
Sixty percent 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 will be a pleasant community space awaiting visitors to Városliget, the city’s park.
The trademark of the building is the glass curtain wall 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 modern and 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 realization 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.
The purpose-built museum was designed with maximum consideration for the required functions, and thus facilitates the large-scale, modern, user-friendly operation of the institution to a significant degree, along with the visually enticing and diverse display of mankind’s material and spiritual heritage, as well as the collection comprising Hungarian and international material.
Project: Museum of Ethnography
Architects: NAPUR Architect Kft.
Lead Architect: Marcel Ferencz
Design Team: Détári György, Filó Gergely, Holyba Pál, Nyul Dávid, Grócz Csaba, Koralevicz Kinga, and Mészáros Mónika
Landscape Architects: Garten Studio Kft.
Interior Designers: Czakó Építész Kft.
Client: Városliget Zrt.
Photographers: Gyorgy Palko