Ethnography Museum

We propose to fracture the building envelope of the Ethnography museum vertically as well as its clear horizontal programmatic stratification, to allow public life, urban flows and views of art to permeate the building through a network of cracks and gaps. We would like to create a structure that combines a logical and efficient organization in terms of programmatic adjacencies, with an organic experience, intuitive orientation and exciting spatial relationships. The building massing creates a landscape of boulder like fragments symbolizing urban tissue with irregular streets, passages and alleys creating shortcuts between street, corner piazza and park.

We propose to prioritize the human scale by introducing an urban irregularity into the formal master plan. Vertically, daylight flows through the generous skylights between the art galleries, into the foyer and the exhibition spaces below. The new building responds to this context by combining modern construction techniques with local materials used in their simplest, most expressive form.

The building is multi-functional, including areas for academic study alongside a reference library and research laboratories. On the ground level, accessed from the foyer, a children’s teaching area reinforces the building’s social and educational program, while its auditorium, can be used independently for outside events.

The spectacular angular roof is clad with high-performance glazing and a shading screen to minimize solar gain, while opening the atrium space to light and views.

Located at the edge the City Park, the scheme celebrates the balance it is determined to maintain between the green zones of the park and the urban texture. The current public car parking area will be transformed into a promenade with lush trees unified with hard and soft landscaping. New connections will be forged by an underground network, which will allow visitors to move freely whatever the weather. We propose this alternative underground route to be punctuated by light wells, which draw in daylight and open up views, this route will enjoy a strong relationship with the environment above ground. There will also be discreet belowground access for vehicles; and links to the nearby metro station will be improved.

Visitors can enter the galleries from the main atrium, the so-called furnace and out of museum hours the space regularly hosts a variety of social events, including concerts and public performances. Designed to do ‚the most with the least’, the fluid-form, fully glazed roof canopy develops a magical visitor experience bathing the inner spaces in daylight.

The form, language and materiality have been derived from the building’s functionality of representing Hungarian traditional elements. Instead of a curved form for the envelope, our building has an angular mineral-like form of earthy coloration, providing a fitting contrast of form adding to the ever-interesting enclave of contrast that makes up the essence of Hungarian traditional folk art.

The so important Hungarian roots of folk traditions are rooted from the single most important of the folkloric family, the furnace.  Curvy, elegant and respectful undulating shapes of the methaforic furnace feature becomes a public plaza, the vertical circulation core, the beating heart and soul of the museum, visually balancing the weight of the state-of-the-art modern envelope and traditional folk motives of the interiors, emphasizing the Museum of Ethnography as a contemporary institution, while retaining the integrity of the park access, and the City Park’s exposure on to the main road of Dozsa Gyorgy street.

The gallery spaces are configured to allow art to be displayed with a more obvious sense of clarity and light. Surrounding the museum, new landscaping is designed to strengthen park links with the corner of Dozsa Gyorgy street and Ajtosi Durer sor. The landscape design follows sculptural massing of the museum.