In January, the City Woods, one of Budapest’s green lungs, hosted the opening of the Magyar Zene Haza, the Magic Mushroom-like House of Music. Since Monday, May 23, a brand new ethnographic museum has been welcoming the public not far from there. Like its neighbour, the Neprajzi Muzeum depends on the Liget Project, aimed at providing the Hungarian capital with a vast museum district. Designed by a Magyar architectural firm, the building is distinguished by “its facades decorated with pixelated patterns” et “its 7,000 m roof garden2” in a circle, “offering a magnificent panorama from the top”, relate Origo.
Under the roof, a free exhibition and two paying presentations await the curious. The first brings together “thousands of ceramics”, the second “allows you to examine everyday objects” and the last “swarms with elements around rites, weddings, expeditions or identities”, enumerates Telex. These three collections “are just the beginning”, because “3,500 objects will soon move into the half-used building so far,” develops the site.
The daily Magyar Hírlap appreciates the ceramics room, whose arrangement along the main staircase “reminiscent of the Louvre”. At the same time, the newspaper strongly recommends an interactive exhibition entitled “The Golden Age of Budapest”, which “shows vanished neighborhoods, scandals and secrets” of the Danubian capital at the turn of the XIXe and XXe centuries.
Longer than Parliament
Ironically comparing the undulating structure of the museum to “a gigantic skateboarding training ground”, the weekly HVG specifies that this imposing construction “exceeds Parliament by 29 meters in length and 15,000 m2 in total area”.
The newspaper Folk word greet her “special feeling” provided by the park overlooking the building, but deplores the “significant amount” the museum construction site (approximately 90 million euros), “revised upwards in progress”, as well as its construction by two construction companies “close to the current government”. The establishment hopes for 300,000 paying visitors per year “at the very place where a car park with more than 1,500 spaces was enthroned from the beginning of the 1950s until the start of the works, in 2017”, reports the business daily World economy.