Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has won the competition to design the new headquarters of the Natural History Museum in Debrecen, Hungary's second largest city. The building, located on the site of a former sports area on the edge of a centuries-old forest, will replace the institution's current urban headquarters, with the aim of enhancing the city's role as a cultural player on an international scale.

In the words of Bjarke Ingels, founder and creative director of BIG:“natural history is a subject dear to me, so dear that I named my oldest son Darwin. To that end, it is a great honor to have been entrusted with the authorship of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in the Great Forest of Debrecen. Our design is conceived as an intersection of paths and lineages. Intersecting ribbons of landscape overlap to produce a series of niches and habitats, halls and galleries, blending the inside and the outside, the intimate and the mastodontic in seamless continuity. The result is a manmade hill in a forest clearing; geometrically clear yet softly organic, an appropriate home for the wonders of the natural world” .  

The complex is characterised, according to BIG's habits, by a crystalline and disarming simplicity that does not undermine the character and spectacularity of the intervention. Three intertwined and overlapping volumes, rising from the forest floor as if under an endogenous thrust, form a star-shaped layout composed of artificial hills organically integrated with the context. A network of paths, squares and open spaces snakes through, making the museum accessible from all sides and linking it to the urban fabric and landscape. The solid wood structure, the facade cladding of local charred wood and the sloping green roofs, planted with native species, blur the boundary between construction and nature. Inside, five permanent exhibition halls and one for temporary exhibitions and events, educational and research facilities and public services unfold around the central hall on the ground floor while, on the upper level, the restaurant and library open up spectacular views of the tree canopies.

Particular attention is paid to environmental sustainability and reducing the building's ecological footprint. As Hanna Johansson, a partner in the firm BIG, states: “we envisioned the Hungarian Natural History Museum as an integrated part of its environment, both shaped by and shaping the landscape around it (...) The museum draws on the thermal mass of the ground and integrates on-site energy systems, including geothermal loops and photovoltaic panels, to ensure a stable indoor climate year-round. Rather than simply preserving the site, the building restores and enhances it, regenerating biodiversity while quietly adapting to its surroundings”.