Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has completed a museum dedicated to music topped with an undulating roof punctuated by trees in Budapest's City Park.
Named House of Music, the 9,000-square-metre museum is dedicated to telling the history of music over the past 2,000 years.
Sou Fujimoto's House of Music is located in Budapest's City Park
The museum, which was built on the site of the Hungexpo Offices, is surrounded by trees within Budapest's City Park.
Fujimoto designed the building, which is wrapped in a glass wall and topped by a large overhanging roof, to mimic the feeling of being under a tree canopy.
The museum was designed to evoke a canopy of trees
"We were enchanted by the multitude of trees in the city park and inspired by the space created by them," said Fujimoto.
"Whilst the thick and rich canopy covers and protects its surroundings, it also allows the sun's rays to reach the ground. I envisaged the open floor plan, where boundaries between inside and outside blur, as a continuation of the natural environment."
The roof is punctured by numerous holes
The building's roof is punctuated by 100 openings, some of which contain trees, while others create lightwells that allow natural light into the building.
On the underside of the roof, 30,000 geometric shapes designed to evoke tree leaves have been set in the ceiling.
The ceiling is covered in 30,000 metal leaves
The House of Music has three storeys that were created to reflect "the three movements of a musical score".
Its park-level ground floor is entirely surrounded by 94 custom-manufactured panels made of glass. The largest of these panels is 12 metres tall.
A glass wall surrounds the ground floor
This largely open ground floor space contains two concert halls. A smaller venue will predominantly be used for lectures and workshops, while a glass-walled auditorium with 320 seats will be used for musical performances.
A large basement level will contain all of the museum's main gallery spaces including a permanent exhibition named Sound Dimensions – Musical Journeys in Space and Time, which focuses on the history of European music.
The institution's first temporary exhibition will focus on key moments in Hungarian pop music from the 1950s to the 1990s.
A hemispherical sound dome, where up to 60 people can experience 360-degree sound from a network of 31 loudspeakers, is also on this level.
A large spiral staircase connects the three floors
Above the main level, the first floor is located within the roof structure. This level contains a multimedia library and archive of Hungarian pop music, as well as classrooms and office spaces.
The three floors are connected by a large feature spiral staircase.
The museum was created as part of the Liget Budapest Project
The House of Music was completed as part of the ambitious Liget Budapest Project, which will see several museums built in Budapest's 122-hectare City Park.
Interior courtyards filled with indoor trees and greenery create a tranquil, peaceful atmosphere. For our latest lookbook, we've collected ten homes from the Dezeen archive with beautiful courtyards at the heart of the interior.
Interior courtyards are mostly found in homes in warmer climates, where they help create a connection to the outdoors while bringing more light and air inside.
Adding trees and green plants to the courtyards make for decorative spaces that also function as sheltered miniature gardens.
The homes in this lookbook are spread out across the globe, from Israel to Japan and Mexico, but all feature soothing courtyard rooms filled with plants.
This home in the Willamette Valley wine country in Oregon was designed around a glazed garden filled with native deciduous trees.
As well as being decorative, the courtyard helps with the heating and cooling of the house by increasing passive solar heating in the winter and stimulating passive cooling and natural ventilation in the summer.
Mexican architect Daniela Bucio Sistos's design for Casa UC in Morelia features pigmented concrete and brick, as well as a central inner courtyard that has its own disc-shaped canopy.
A Momoqui tree (Caesalpinia pluviosa) that sits at the centre of the courtyard, surrounded by plants, lends the modernist house a more organic feel.
The wooden Host House in Utah is clad in cedar planks and surrounded by trees. This focus on nature continues inside, where an inner courtyard holds a small tree.
Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, the central opening helps to add light to the interior.
"The client was a very private individual who supported a design approach that located the glazing in specific zones of the house to provide ample daylight and privacy," the architects said.
A small internal courtyard holds an Acer, or Japanese maple tree, planted amongst ground-covering greenery and practical stepping stones that let the owners cut through to different parts of Carlton House in Melbourne.
The courtyard is part of a timber extension that Reddaway Architects added to an Edwardian-style brick building. As well as the courtyard, added skylights help give the new space a bright feel.
This townhouse in Tel Aviv's oldest neighbourhood (above and top image) was given a refresh by architect Meirav Galan, who added a glass-clad secret courtyard.
The triple-height courtyard rises through the building and holds Mediterranean plants that help create a tranquil centre space. A small seating area adds to the relaxed feel and lets the owners make more use of the indoor garden.
Gosize's design for F Residence in Hyōgo, Japan, features large openings centred around a courtyard with a minimalist pond and rough stone that extends into the living space.
The home, which has a spartan, peaceful feel, was designed with a high concrete wall next to the double-height courtyard to create more privacy.
Designs that perfectly blend the indoors and the outdoors are seen in many Vietnamese houses, and Wall House in Bien Hoa is an especially striking example.
The multi-generational family home has hole-punctured bricks that let sunlight and air in, and an expansive living area that has the feel of an indoor courtyard. This features an array of leafy greens and trees that have been planted around the periphery of the room.
A 19th-century brick townhouse in Brooklyn was given skylights and a courtyard by O'Neill McVoy Architects as part of a complete redesign.
The studio created a "light garden" at the centre of the family home. Sliding glass walls with mahogany frames surround the 18-square-metre garden, which is landscaped with black river rocks, a dogwood tree and climbing vines.
Studio Four created Ruxton Rise Residence for its own co-director, Sarah Henry, designing a grey-brick home centred around a courtyard planted with olive trees.
The open-air courtyard was created to acts as an additional room in the house, where its inhabitants can take advantage of the mild Melbourne weather. All communal spaces in the house face the courtyard, which connects the living spaces and provides a "calming effect."
Mexican architecture firms Espacio 18 and Cueto added an internal courtyard and a rooftop patio to this Mexican townhouse to make the most of a small site.
As the home takes up the entire buildable area, the interior courtyard was added to give the owners a bit of outdoor space. Double-height glazed walls surround the decked patio, which has an acacia tree in the middle that blooms with bright purple flowers in the springtime.
A colour scheme informed by soil and moss features inside this showroom in Antwerp, Belgium, which Yakusha Design has developed for its own furniture line Faina.
The retail space, named Faina Gallery, is set inside a 500-year-old building.
As a result, the studio steered away from making major structural alterations to avoid disturbing its historic framework.
The Faina showroom is set within a 500-year-old building
Instead, the Ukrainian studio devised a new colour palette, painting walls throughout the shop in earthy shades that evoke the natural world.
"I wanted to convey this feeling of grounding serenity in the interior," explained Victoria Yakusha, who founded both Yakusha Design and Faina.
"Nothing is more powerful than the energy of earth. When standing on bare earth, I am one with nature, I gain strength."
Walls in the first room are coated with green paint
Upon entering Faina Gallery, visitors walk into a room almost entirely washed with a deep, mossy green paint.
The only surfaces untouched by the colour are the grey terrazzo floors and the ceiling, which has been left in its original state.
A stainless-steel cabinet shows off Faina's ceramic ornaments
Matching green furnishings are displayed throughout the space, including Faina's angular Toptun armchairs and three of its knobbly hand-sculpted Soniah floor lamps.
There is also a beige edition of the Plyn sofa, with its gently curving cushions stacked on top of each other "like stones that have been naturally polished by wild waters".
Black paint covers the showroom's second room
A bespoke stainless steel shelving unit runs the length of one of the walls.
Designed to resemble a cabinet of curiosities, it showcases an array of Faina's ceramic ornaments alongside a number of scents for the home.
The storage unit is interrupted by a steel-lined doorway that leads through to Faina Gallery's second room.
This space has been painted jet-black in a nod to chernozem, a highly fertile black soil that is found in abundance throughout Ukraine.
Faina furnishings displayed here include the Ztista table and Domna chair
The furniture presented here is dark, too. One corner of the room is dominated by a black version of Faina's hole-punctured Ztista table while a charcoal-grey model of the brand's bulbous Domna chair sits nearby.
There's also a wall-mounted black tapestry emblazoned with the word "earth", written in the symbol-based writing system of the ancient Cucuteni-Trypillia civilisation, which lived in Ukraine in the fifth millennium BC.
A circular black wall hanging is emblazoned with Cucuteni-Trypillian symbology
Victoria Yakusha established her eponymous studio in 2006 before launching Faina in 2014.
Completed last year, the 300-square-metre residence was designed to provide a clear distinction between its various programme elements with a simple structural concept. Debaixo do Bloco Arquitetura, a firm based in Brasília and São Paulo, did this by dividing the home into three roughly equal blocks.
The house in Brasília is formed from concrete
"A plot with three different levels and a simple structural system were the architectural starting points that defined the logic that this brutalist house was built with," explained the architects.
Each of the volumes has an angular roof that pitches towards the centre, forming a light well. The roofs are supported by four internal columns, and four exterior pillars that are taller.
Debaixo do Bloco Arquitetura split the residence into three volumes
"This set of concrete structural elements delivers the architecture of the house, and stands out on the facade and in the internal environments," said Debaixo do Bloco Arquitetura.
"The decision to leave them in their pure state, showing the material that they are made of, is intentional, so it is clear how the house was conceived," they added.
Wood flooring features inside
Following the slope of the project's site, the first cube-shaped volume contains the home's communal areas. The architects laid out the living areas with a variety of seating arrangements surrounding the light well, which contains a small tree.
In addition to the roof's concrete surface, which is visible throughout the residence, the architects included a variety of finishes that reference Brasília's strong modernist heritage.
"The interior's wood flooring and freijó wood panels warm the environment, and bring cosiness to a project where brutalism is present in its most rustic state," said Debaixo do Bloco Arquitetura, who added that their goal for the interiors was "balance".
A few steps down is an area referred to as the services block, which contains the kitchen and a guest suite. This area brings a touch of colour to the house, with green cabinets and furniture.
The kitchen has green cabinets
In the intermediate space between the kitchen and living room, the architects included a semi-circular nook with a breakfast table that offers a space for more casual meals.
Lastly, the bedrooms are located at the lowest point of the home. These rooms have tall glass walls that slide open, extending the resident's quarters to a wraparound patio outside, which is partially shaded by the overhanging roofline.
Glass walls in the bedrooms open onto a patio
Brasília is a modernist city that was designed in the 20th century by Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, and Roberto Burle Marx. Last year, Italian architect Carlo Ratti revealed plans for a tech campus designed as an extension to the iconic grid of the original city.
Fletcher Crane Architects has completed a two-bedroom house on a brownfield plot in west London featuring grey-brick walls that are left exposed throughout the living areas and sunken bedrooms.
Named Tree House, the dwelling was designed by London studio Fletcher Crane Architects for a former garage site in a conservation area in Chiswick that is bounded by rear gardens.
Fletcher Crane Architects has completed a grey-brick house in London
The studio was challenged to design a house that makes the most of the compact plot while also meeting strict local planning criteria including a limit to the building's parapet level.
To provide the necessary spaces, this required embedding the house in the ground using excavations extending to a depth of 3.2 metres below street level.
It occupies the site of an old garage
"Building on a brownfield site with a series of constraints ultimately created a special home," project architect Harry Reid told Dezeen.
"The resulting massing straddles the boundary over a split-level arrangement of four floors," Reid added. "This configuration means no floor is really disconnected from each other and makes the 85-square-metre home feel bigger than it really is."
The brickwork is exposed inside
Tree House is designed to fit unobtrusively in the terraced street, although its geometric form and grey-brick walls mark it out as a contemporary addition. Its name nods to a tree situated on the pavement outside.
"The street scene is mature and repetitive, with a significant row of historic villas which are all set back from the road," Reid pointed out. "Our site sits on the street front and we used brick boundary walls to ensure this stitched into the prevailing materiality."
Exposed brick is teamed with ash joinery and terrazzo flooring
The cubic volumes are built using load-bearing brick with flush-jointed lime mortar. The brickwork is left exposed both inside and out to highlight the construction method.
A secluded passage along the western boundary leads to the house's entrance, which opens onto a kitchen-diner and a circulation spine connecting several split levels.
The house enters into a kitchen-diner
The main living areas are located on the upper floors to make the most of the available natural light. Two bedrooms with adjoining bathrooms are situated within the semi-sunken levels below.
A courtyard adjoining one of the bedrooms is lined with stepped brick planters and is accessed from the driveway via a paddle stair made from black cobble setts.
Externally, the grey brick contrasts with black timber and tubular metalwork, forming a simple and raw material palette that extends inside the house.
The internal brick walls are complemented by ash joinery, terrazzo tiles and metal balustrades. Windows and skylights wash the rooms with natural light while curved elements, including a railing that wraps around the staircase, soften the overall aesthetic.
A sunken bedroom leads out onto a courtyard
Fletcher Crane Architects was established in 2010 in Kingston upon Thames by Toby Fletcher and Ian Crane. The studio's previous work includes a house built on an infill site beneath a high-rise building near London's Hyde Park.
