The new building of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest City Park (Városliget) was opened (on 23/05/2022). The multiple-award-winning new museum building – which is part of Europe’s largest urban-cultural development called Liget Budapest Project – designed by FERENCZ, Marcel; Napur Architect – has dynamic yet simple lines simultaneously harmonized with the park environment and communicating with the surrounding urban area. The City Park (Városliget) is a familiar venue for the Museum of Ethnography: its collection debuted here at the 1896 Millennium Exhibition. The City Park (Városliget) is not an entirely unknown venue for the Museum of Ethnography, since it was here in 1896, at the National Millennium Exhibition.
The spectacular 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 Museum of Ethnography is already recognized as one of the most exciting contemporary buildings in the continent. Evidence of that, it was voted for the Best Mega Futura Project of Europe (as part of the Liget Project) at the MIPIM Awards 2017 and has won the fiercely contested title of World’s Best Architecture at the 2018 International Property Awards. The project was one of over 1700 entries from 115 countries, scrutinized by a judging committee, which is chaired by four UK Lords as well as over 80 global experts.
