Sordo Madaleno wins competition for Hungarian museum archive with stratified brick facade

Mexico City-based Sordo Madaleno, in collaboration with építész stúdió and engineering firm Buro Happold, has won the international competition to design the new Collection Centre for the Hungarian Museum of Natural History in Debrecen. The win comes months after Bjarke Ingels Group won a separate competition for the main Hungarian Museum of Natural History.

The 430,000-square-foot Collection Centre forms part of a wider program of urban and academic development in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. The center will support the storage, research, and conservation of more than 11 million artefacts and specimens. The design of the scheme is based on the idea of the “building as vessel,” drawing on the form and cultural significance of traditional Hungarian clay containers used to preserve food and materials. The proposed structure is an elongated rectilinear volume, conceived as a solid and durable form suited to long-term conservation.

A stratified brick facade references Hungary’s geological diversity, with bricks produced from soils sourced across different regions of the country. Variations in color are intended to symbolically reflect the museum’s fields of study, including geology, palaeontology, zoology, anthropology, and ecology.

The building will contain approximately 280,000 square feet of archive storage, 60,000 square feet of research and conservation space, and a triple-height atrium designed to accommodate visiting researchers, students, and educational groups. The atrium will also function as a display and events space, with lecture halls and gallery areas. Controlled internal courtyards will introduce daylight and ventilation into staff workspaces while maintaining museum-grade environmental conditions.  

“The Centre’s staff are stewards of the objects, and the architecture becomes an extension of that stewardship,” Fernando Sordo Madaleno said about the scheme. Within this layered ecology of care, the object is framed not as an isolated artefact but as an embodiment of life-worlds and landscapes that “nourish reciprocal relationships. Our building reflects this mutuality, providing a space of unity between conservator, stakeholder, architecture, and environment.”