What is a museum today?
Plans, dreams and tasks following the Liget Budapest international design competition
MúzeumCafé 46.
Liget Budapest has passed an important milestone. In the framework of investment announced in 2011 whereby six national museums would move to the regenerated City Park, the largest architectural design competition in Hungary’s history has taken place. Among the 470 submissions, winners were announced ‘only’ for designs for the Photography Museum, which will move from Kecskemét, the newly housed Hungarian Museum of Architecture and the Ethnography Museum, plus the newly founded House of Hungarian Music. The jury decided to re-run the competition for the building to house both the National Gallery and the Ludwig Museum. The last completely newly built museum in Hungary opened in 1980. I have worked with the Liget Budapest project since August 2013. Roughly six months of my work focussed on preparing the international design competition. The team hoped that this phase of the decade-long process would calm much of the anxiety about the concept. Can such large-scale buildings really be located in the City Park? Can a balanced relation between the new construction and the park be created? How can new routes and new spaces for public use be established in the park, such that the existing green areas will suffer the least? How would foreign architects react to the competition, and would it guarantee the much asserted international standard? In the age of the internet it may be surprising, but the last-mentioned concern is justified. The last initiative in Hungary in terms of such a large project was in 1964-1965 in relation to the National Theatre. However, the call for tenders was directed only at Comecon countries. Western architects could not participate. The announcement was not even translated into English and thus publicity was limited. Meanwhile, in recent decades it became customary, indeed expected, that large-scale public investments would involve open, international competitions, but with the lack of foreign competitors from 1989-90 right up to the crisis, a false sense of security pervaded Hungarian architects. With very few exceptions, they did not turn to foreign countries, even when they could have done – because there was no compulsion to do so. With an international competition, Hungary would be stepping into the ring as an unknown actor, with the danger that domestic competitors might be put off. Moreover, for an English-language call for tenders the legal background first had to be changed – with the participation of the Hungarian Chamber of Architecture. Since the English-language announcement didn’t on its own guarantee either quality or wide international circulation, help was sought for defining the criteria, publicity and related communication from the world’s major organisation of architects, the Union Internationale des Architectes. The results of previous design competitions of the UIA include the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the more recent reconstruction and expansion of the Prado in Madrid. From the professional aspect, we studied similar announcements made in recent years in connection with the Municipal Library and Nobel Centre in Stockholm, new cultural institutes in Helsinki and Taichung, and Zaryadye Park in Moscow. We obtained professional help for undertaking this work, including examination of individual building projects, from the Paris affiliate of Canada’s Lord Cultural Resources. The enterprise, which was founded in 1981, is in the forefront of this field, and with a little exaggeration it can be said that it works with the majority of the world’s large museums – in Hungary it has had connections with the Ludwig Museum. First of all, however, attention had to be paid to future users of the six institutes which would find a new home under the Liget Budapest project. Partly building on existing development projects and partly through joint work, putting together the existing basics we prepared the different parts of the announcement, trying to ensure a balance between the individual projects for each institute. In addition, it was necessary to coordinate with domestic professional organisations, prepare the necessary engineering plans, survey the location and environment, modify the regulations and find specialists for the competition organisation and members of the jury. All this had to be done in Hungarian and English using the appropriate channels. Besides the everyday organisational work, important decisions had to be made about the competition. One concerned begin free of charge, which in this field is not common – yet it really guaranteed an open opportunity for all. On the other hand, already in the first round such a concept was expected that gave an assurance of the applicant’s thorough grounding and of the fact that they would accept the challenges that went with implementation. The question of responsibility played a role in deciding that tenders had to be in English. Of course, this was for essentially practical reasons. English was the language of the jury. Translating tenders in Hungarian would have involved too much time, energy and money (moreover, discussion of meaning and even legal disputes can arise). Using English ensured the same kind of quality guarantee for Hungarian architects. Whoever is capable of putting together an English-language tender would have no difficulty as a winner having to work later in an international team. Publishing the announcement itself presented the huge challenge of how to make an uninformed party understand its comprehensive nature, given that the Ludwig and the National Gallery would move in together, while the Architecture Museum and the Photography Museum, due to the selected location, had to be handled together. From this was born the slogan: ‘Six institutes, five buildings, four competitions’. Sorting out the procedure required special work and so did the development of a manageable online background which could be monitored yet provide anonymity. Thanks to Zoltán Rostás and Balázs Jelinek (today the strategic director of Városliget Ltd. and the design competition project manager), who in the main undertook verification and professional coordination, and the hard work of ministerial commissioner László Baán and of several dozen colleagues in the profession, Hungary’s first English-language international design competition was announced in February 2014. Since the national competition for location design, announced in 2013, produced guidelines rather than clear and unambiguous results, the final question of locations remained until the last-minute. In line with earlier published versions, in the announcement the Hungarian House of Music and the Photography Museum would remain in their original planned location.