by Marcell Bárdos
University of Groningen
As an aspiring academic and emigrant from a country under autocratic rule—the infamous Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—I have long had a natural interest in how contemporary art is used as means of manipulation by larger social and political forces. Accordingly, I devoted this project to investigating how culture is instrumentalized in my troubled home country. I chose to focus on a building I know well, Magyar Zene Háza, or the House of Music Hungary, which is a dazzling piece of architecture located in Budapest, a futuristic golden shelter that structurally imitates nature and music.
Promotion picture of the House of Music
(https://ligetbudapest.hu/projekt/magyar-zene-haza)
The House of Music was part of a highly expensive, state-financed prestige project to build cultural venues in Városliget, the city’s oldest and largest park. Its construction was surrounded by constant controversy, yet the final product was surprisingly well-received. Today, it hosts popular events as a museum, archive, and performance hall. However, the celebratory reception and commercial success conceals the more troubling aspects of its existence.
An explicit goal of the institution’s curators and star architect, Sou Fujimoto, was staging an immersive, multisensory experience for the visitors. For this reason, and to keep the project grounded in lived experience, I started my research with a field visit: documenting and immersing myself in the building’s tangible designed space. Prior to analysis, I observed how the House of Music’s spatial elements, like its golden canopy ceiling with leaf-like geometric patterns, shape my perception.
The building’s main hall (photography Marcell Bárdos)
The golden canopy ceiling with lamps hanging like tendrils (photography Marcel Bárdos)
My experience was twofold. I felt awe and aesthetic pleasure from the futuristic yet nature-like, disorienting interior. At the same time, I sensed an atmosphere of artificiality pervading the entire space; something I termed calculated organicity. This internal tension between amazement and alienation revealed to me that my wonder was artificially engineered. I intuited that the building wanted to enchant my perception in order to obscure something else.
After my encounter, I began reflecting on my intuition, gradually uncovering a story of political deceit and corruption. Investigative reports from the Hungarian independent press exposed that the House of Music’s construction involved the destruction of cherished green spaces, the displacement of environmental protesters, and the funneling of public funds into the pockets of government-aligned businessmen. I drew on sociological studies on Orbán’s Hungary to frame these developments within the country’s broader politico-economic system. I found that the regime enforces an authoritarian form of capitalism which relentlessly accumulates wealth to the detriment of the country and its inhabitants.
To analyze the building’s social and cultural function, I used marketing and critical theory, that is, the concept of the “experience economy” and Adorno & Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry. I arrived at the argument that the House of Music functions as a brand designed to sell an experience that not only commodifies art, but also markets and legitimizes the regime that financed it. Overall, I learned that contemporary immersive architectural design easily lends itself to political instrumentalization because of its illusionistic aesthetics. It erases underlying social relations and seduces the beholder through heavy impact on the senses. In this light, the House of Music is a lens onto contemporary soft propaganda, which increasingly operates not through plain repression, but orchestrated wonder.
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