The museum is built as two worlds: an almost opaque exhibition hall holding the accumulated faces of Transylvanian history, and a research body of laboratories, archives and offices where that history is recovered. A central core joins them, gathering entrance, café and shop, while a sculptural bridge runs along the building as its principal public threshold, opening towards the hills of Florești and Cetatea Fetei. Locally fired Siena clinker carries from outside to inside, so the whole reads as a single mass of fired earth.