A centerpiece of the cultural program of the former Orbán government, the New Hungarian National Gallery (Új Nemzeti Galéria) will not see the light of day in Városliget Park, declared David Vitézy, Minister of Transport and Investment, during a press conference on June 18. The announcement follows a government resolution published the same day by the new team, which redirects certain cultural development projects in Budapest Park that are still unfinished.
Supported for more than a decade by the former national-conservative government as part of the “Liget Budapest Project”, the New National Gallery was to be located in Városliget Park to house the Hungarian and international collections of post-1800 art from the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery. The Japanese architectural firm SANAA had designed the plans for a monumental building of 50,000 m2, the financing of which – state – was to be around 300 million euros. The new government now intends to prioritize the rehabilitation of the park, while the cost of the SANAA project constituted a considerable investment.
Mired in a conflict of jurisdiction between the state and the capital, against a backdrop of political confrontation, the project had been at a standstill since 2019. The mayor of Budapest Gergely Karácsony, then recently elected, had obstructed the Prime Minister’s wishes, highlighting environmental concerns. Gergely Karácsony did not want such a monumental building to cover one of the city’s few green spaces. If the Orbán government directly financed the project, the municipality controlled a decisive part of the regulatory and urban planning framework of Városliget Park, putting the project in a blocked situation.
If the construction of the museum in Városliget Park is definitely no longer relevant, the project should nevertheless flourish again elsewhere, and in a different form. During his announcement on June 18, David Vitézy presented two avenues for the future of the New National Gallery. The space housing the collections of the current Hungarian National Gallery being degraded, the new museum could be inaugurated in an adapted location of the royal palace of Buda, or be the subject of a new construction, outside the Városliget. László Baán, director of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and instigator of the New National Gallery project, was optimistic about the possibility of the original architectural project being carried out elsewhere, reports the Hungarian news site HVG.
A major axis of Orbanian cultural policy, the “Liget Project” aimed to increase the prestige of the Hungarian capital on an artistic level. For a decade, the program has helped transform the landscape of Budapest: the House of Hungarian Music opened in 2022 in the heart of Városliget, the Budapest Ethnographic Museum was moved to a new building on the edge of the municipal park in 2022, and the current Museum of Fine Arts was completely renovated between 2015 and 2018.
The new building of the Budapest Ethnographic Museum, designed by the Napur architectural firm and inaugurated in June 2022.
© Incze László
