Inspired by the shelter a tree gives, the House of Hungarian Music is embedded in the dense vegetation of the City Park in Budapest. The building is included within the Liget Budapest Project, an ambitious cultural initiative to renovate this historic site, and that will include interventions such as the New National Gallery designed by SANAA.

An undulating disk, randomly perforated, goes up on slender pillars, freeing up the ground level to welcome visitors approaching from any direction. The perforations let natural light through and generate an atmosphere similar to the one created under the dense foliage of the forest. The program is not just a museum, but is a larger vision where the architecture itself is part of the experience. Visitors are free to wander about the building, as they would around a park, and feel how sound and light interact with the building. The spaces are distributed in three levels: an underground floor, which houses the music dome and larger exhibition halls; an intermediate open-plan space, where the boundaries between the interiors and the gardens fade away; and an elevated volume, connected with the sky by courtyards and skylights... [+]