Hungary is moving its national natural history collection out of Budapest and into a forest. By 2030, a striking new museum designed by Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) will open in Debrecen, the country's second-largest city, on the northern edge of the historic Great Forest (Nagyerdő).
The building itself is the story. Three overlapping landscaped ribbons rise from the forest floor to form what the architects describe as a manmade hill in a clearing — a roughly 247,000-square-foot structure built from mass timber and clad in locally sourced charred wood panels. The roof is planted with native species, so the museum literally extends the forest canopy and encourages flora and fauna to return to land that was once part of the woods. Visitors arrive via winding forest paths and open plazas, and a south-facing plaza doubles as a community events space.
Inside, this is designed as a living institution rather than a static hall of specimens. There are interactive learning zones, ecological pathways and rooftop gardens that double as research spaces for environmental and biodiversity work. A library and restaurant will look out over the treetops, while a subterranean learning hub underneath the main floors hosts workshops, play areas and research labs aimed at students and families. Vegetation runs through the interiors too, blurring the line between building and woodland.
The government signed off on relocating the museum in 2019, choosing Debrecen to give the institution a modern, purpose-built home and to cement the city's role as an intellectual and cultural hub for eastern Hungary. The design was picked through an international competition, and the museum is expected to become a landmark for both architecture and natural science once doors open.
For travellers, Debrecen is worth adding to the map well before 2030. The Great Forest is one of Hungary's oldest protected parks, with thermal baths, a zoo and a leafy university quarter, and the city is far cheaper and calmer than Budapest. If the new museum delivers on its promise, Hungary's second city could become one of Central Europe's more surprising cultural stops — a place where the headline attraction is built from wood, half-buried in a forest, and growing plants on its roof.
