After having tied with Snøhetta in a restricted competition to design the New National Gallery -- Ludwig Museum in Budapest, SANAA’s proposal has ultimately been selected as the winner, following negotiations held over the past few months. The gallery and museum will be located in the 200-year-old Városliget (City Park) and are part of the larger Liget Budapest project, which seeks to revive the park by 2018 with the addition of five new museum buildings, including Sou Fujimoto’s House of Hungarian Music.
Atelier YokYok, in partnership with Sammode, created a temporary geometric forest called “TREEDOM” for the 2015 Sziget Festival in Budapest. Constructed in nine days before the festival, and then dismounted in two days afterwards, the installation was composed of 37 wood poles, and over 200 boards, with the highest point extending 10 meters.
Envisioning the House of Hungarian Music as the new center of distribution within Liget Park, MenoMenoPiu Architects proposed a circular form for the concert hall, facilitating circulation to and from the museum and within the park. Although not the final winner of the Liget-Budapest Competition, “The Circle” demonstrates an interesting organizational strategy and perspective on sound.
SANAA and Snøhetta have been jointly awarded first prize in a restricted competition to build a "New National Gallery - Ludwig Museum" in Budapest's 200-year-old Városliget (City Park). Lauded for their "equally outstanding" proposals, the winning teams will now meet with the jury to be judged "on professional and financial considerations."
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and the joint proposal of Balázs Mihály's Architect Studio and the Faculty of Architecture of Budapest University of Technology and Economics were awarded second prize.
The competition is part of a larger cultural project that aims to renew the city's Városliget by 2018 with five new museum buildings built inside the expanded park area.
A closer look at the winning schemes, after the break.
Arriving at Budapest’s international airport on a warm Saturday in July, I confess to being unprepared for my week ahead at Hello Wood 2014. Hungary was the third country and Budapest the fourth city I had been in in 72 hours, and thanks to this (uncharacteristically) chaotic week, I hadn’t had the chance to research anything about the camp. All I knew was what could be learned from the photos of the 2013 camp which I had published almost a year earlier: that is, that the camp is held in an idyllic rural setting, presumably a significant distance from Budapest; and that the quality of work seems unusually high for a week-long architecture workshop, presumably indicating a serious, focused atmosphere at the camp.
The first of these assumptions was absolutely right. But the second could hardly be more wrong. In fact the atmosphere at the camp was so far from being serious that by Tuesday, Gábor Betegh - a friend of the organizers and coincidentally Cambridge University’s new Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy - told me how fascinating it was to compare the “centripetal madness” of the philosophers he knows to the “very centrifugal madness” of the architects at the camp. This remark was made in response to one of the team leaders screeching like a monkey from the top of his team’s half-completed tower.
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View from street. Image Courtesy of O'Donnell + Tuomey / Central European University
Work has begun on O'Donnell + Tuomey's first project in Hungary. The new collection of buildings and restoration projects for the Central European University in Budapest sits within existing courtyards in a dense area of the city. Bringing a total of 35,000m² of new space to the inner-city campus, the project consists of a new library spread across five floors, an auditorium, multiple public spaces, teaching and learning facilities, study rooms, and a café.
John Tuomey and Sheila O'Donnell - recipients of the 2015 Royal Gold Medal. Image Courtesy of RIBA
When Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey, who practice in partnership as O'Donnell + Tuomey, were named as this year's recipients of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, a palpable collective satisfaction appeared to spread throughout the profession. No one could find criticism in Joseph Rykwert and Níall McLaughlin's nomination, nor the ultimate choice of the RIBA Honours Committee, to bestow the award upon the Irish team. Their astonishingly rigourous body of work, compiled and constructed over the last twenty five years, has an appeal which extends beyond Irish and British shores. A robust stock of cultural, community and educational projects, alongside family homes and social housing projects, leaves little doubt about the quality, depth and breadth of their mutual capabilities and the skill of those that they choose to collaborate with.
Read the conversation with the Gold Medallists after the break.
Recent participants in the Liget Budapest design competition, Graeme Massie Architects have taken home third place for their proposed Museum of Ethnography design. The museum, one of five museums planned for the Liget Budapest development, is located at the very corner of Budapest City Park and is meant to act as a welcoming landmark for the city. Graeme Massie fulfills this requirement in a unique fashion, creating a building that is instantly recognizable, but still manages to blend with its surroundings. Learn more, after the break.
Taking home third place in the Liget Budapest competition, the Laboratory for Explorative Architecture and Design (LEAD) has proposed a colorful design for Budapest’s new photography and architecture museums. A stunning shade of blue, the undulating buildings will mark the entrance to Budapest City Park, and provide a new cultural hotspot for Hungary’s capital city. Learn more about them, after the break.
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