New Collection Centre for Hungarian Museum of Natural History

Debrecen, Hungary

In Design

Skylit collection hall with timber shelving displaying natural history specimens at Debrecen Collection Centre, Hungary.

The New Collection Center consolidates the full holdings of the Hungarian Natural History Museum—zoological, botanical, geological, paleontological, and anthropological collections—into a single purpose-built facility in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city and long-standing centre of scientific and cultural life.

Render of Debrecen Collection Centre's terracotta façade set within a flat Hungarian landscape. By Sordo Madaleno.

The Collection Center is presented as one solid, rectilinear building, with a hyper-rational interior and a solid, stratified façade that makes legible the geological heritage of the region. The design is radically lucid, ensuring optimal environmental and technical performance, while working in direct service to the archived ecologies, stored knowledge, and scientific practices it protects inside.

red brick of the New Collection Centre for Hungarian Museum of Natural History set against a blue sky

Earliest brickmaking in the Carpathian Basin — mud and raw clay fired in open-field kilns, their inconsistencies shaped by soil, weather, and chance.

Cartuchos Deportivos, Cuernavaca, 1962. A large-scale industrial building where the expression and visual identity lives in the facade — an approach echoed in the collection centre.. Courtesy of Sordo Madaleno archive.

An important characteristic of soil formation processes is that they usually overlap, appear as prerequisites for each other, in simpler terms, a new process can only be activated when a previous process has taken place, has been completed, and its effect has become permanent in the soil. The quality and color of a soil is determined by a combination of factors: (1) Geology, (2) Togography, (3) Climate, (4) Hydrography, (5) Living World.

The stratified brick façade of the New Debrecen Collection Centre draws on this same regional material history, its five tonal gradients sourced from the soils of Hungary.

The façade’s stratified brickwork mirrors the geological formations and taxonomic systems that define the collection, making the exterior an extension of the archive itself. The factors that influence soil colour—geology, fossils, animal life, human activity, and ecology—carry through to the brick and then to the façade. The building therefore becomes a material representation of the Collection Center’s disciplines.

Backlit animal skeleton gallery at Debrecen Collection Centre natural history museum, Hungary. By Sordo Madaleno.

The building presents a unified architecture: a whole experience. On arrival, users and visitors alike are taken on a journey that begins from a generous public plaza, moving once inside towards a focal heart space—an atrium of triple-height volume at the centre of the building that holds the collection’s limited public display. Adjacent semi-public spaces, such as lecture rooms, feather out from this anchoring space.

Multi-level atrium with illuminated natural history displays at Debrecen Collection Centre, Hungary. By Sordo Madaleno.

The word curator derives from the Latin curare: to care for, attend to, take charge of. The architecture becomes an extension of that stewardship—presenting a building that balances the needs of the object and those of their conservators, where the building takes care of its staff, and the staff in turn is inspired and motivated to take care of the collection.