New Museum of Ethnography Budapest

With NAPUR Architect’s powerful design, the ethnographic collection is back in Budapest City Park.

Since May 2022, the Museum of Ethnography has been back in its original location where it first started more than a century ago. After its establishment in 1872, the first collection of the museum was shown in Budapest City Park during the 1896 celebrations as part of the National Millennium Exhibition. The collection was then housed for many years in the Industrial Hall, also located in City Park. After that, from 1975 until 2022, for almost half a century, the museum was located in the former Palace of Justice, just opposite Parliament. However, as this grand structure was not intended as a museum, it was far from suitable for its function.

The relocated museum is now part of “Liget Budapest”, a new museum quarter in the city’s oldest public park – Városligetm, or City Park. The plans for Liget Budapest feature the total renovation of the park, the reconstruction of some historic buildings, and the construction of new buildings for both new and old cultural institutions. In 2014, three architectural open design competitions were held for the design of the new public buildings in the park. The Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto won the competition for the House of Music, which opened its doors at the beginning of 2022. The Hungarian office of KÖZTI Architects & Engineers won the competitions for the Photo Museum Budapest and Museum of Hungarian Architecture. KÖZTI designed two boxes located on both sides of the memorial to the 1956 Revolution. The competition for the Museum of Ethnography was initially won by the French architects Vallet de Martinis together with DIID architectes. They made a plan for a straightforward white building on columns located on the southernmost corner of City Park. Not long after this competition, however, the government decided to change the masterplan of the Liget Budapest project. The planned Ethnographic Museum was thus moved further north to ’56-ers Square, on the former location of the Photo and Architecture Museums, and so a new competition had to be organized. After the first round, 15 offices were selected, among them renowned names such as OMA from the Netherlands, BIG from Denmark and Zaha Hadid Architects from the UK. After the second round in May 2016, the proposal from the Hungarian NAPUR Architect studio was announced the winner, with Marcel Ferencz as the project architect.

The new location of the museum is not unknown to regular readers of Piranesi, as in issue  #32 we wrote quite extensively about the former Trade Union Building opposite the square. The square is located at the end of Városligeti Fasor (City Park Lane), where the traditional May 1^st parades were held during socialist times. After 1990, the location became a huge parking lot for more than 1,500 cars. In 2006, after a design competition, a steel wedge was placed in the square as a monument to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence.