Lightweight Underground Filling - Ethnographic Museum (Liget Budapest)

Lightweight Underground Filling - Ethnographic Museum (Liget Budapest Project)

The new Ethnographic Museum was designed with the unaltered integration of the 1956 Revolution Memorial in mind, and for this purpose the designer, together with the team of sculptors, created a street artwork. The street artwork completing the memorial that stretches few meters into the construction's perimeter, is situated above the underground level of the building, and in the middle section of the entire compound. The difference in level resulting from the height of the geometric street artwork, and the 1.5-m depth of the arched closing slab required compensation. Given that a large quantity of soil filling would have led to the overloading of the closing slab, the backfill was relieved with foam glass granules. The high load-bearing capacity, shape-retaining, water- and frost-resistant (due to its close-cell structure) properties of the approx. 1,500 m3 low bulk density Energocell® also proved significant in the fulfilment of the construction's technical requirements.

* The new Ethnographic Museum was honoured at the prestigious International Property Awards with two prizes: best public building in Europe, and World's Best Architecture special prize.