The renovation of the Városliget — or City Park — in Budapest has been a years-long project and fraught with controversy and delays. But, finally, much of the hard work is coming to fruition, with the new Museum of Ethnography, recently opening to visitors.

Like the nearby, newly-constructed House of Music, the Museum of Ethnography is an impressive, if not striking structure, rising from the park like wings or enormous ramps. Along the sides, the pixilated metalwork appears to be done as embroidery, or brail. The ‘roof’ is covered with Hungarian grasslands, and visitors are encouraged to climb the steps around the edges to take in one of the better views of the city from the peak. It’s a building that took some courage to make, as there’s nothing else like it in the city, or the country for that matter.

From the Museum’s website: “The new home of the Museum of Ethnography, realised as part of the Liget Budapest Project, opened its doors to the public on 23 May and welcomes visitors with its spectacular exhibitions. The building, designed by Ferencz Marcel (NAPUR Architect) is the first purpose-built facility with its concept tailored to the needs of an ethnographic museum. Now the City Park houses one of Europe’s most modern museum buildings, located on the site of the former Felvonulási Square, where a collection of unrivalled diversity is displayed on a floor space three times larger than in its previous venue on Kossuth Square. The spectacular building with its design evoking a pair of nearly embracing hillsides is distinguished by its unique facade decoration of almost half a million pixels presenting a contemporary adaptation of twenty Hungarian and twenty international ethnographic motifs, as well as by its more than seven-thousand-square-metre roof garden from the highest point of which a stunning panorama opens up. One of the most prestigious competitions of the international property business, the International Property Awards in London, the Museum of Ethnography was selected in 2018 as the world’s best public architecture based on its architectural design alone, and it was also recognised with the Best Architecture main prize.”

In final summation, the new museum is impressive but not imposing, progressive but not avant garde, and at once experimental and traditional. As a location, it’s simply unique. Just what you’d expect from a city that has it all, but still finds room to improve.

Below have a look at the digital rendering of the interior and exterior of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography.

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