Architecture News

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists

By Fred A. Bernstein

Finalist GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles gathered around a cathedral-like central space.<div id='_mcePaste'> — Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles gathered around a cathedral-like central space.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-5631681770 reconfigures circulation and use of the East and West Harbors to establish an area of industrial activity and an area of cultural activity, with the museum as the link between the city and the waterfront. A city street runs through the interior of the museum, opening it to appropriation by the citizens and creating a combination of programs: a museum program and an unpredictable street program, in which visitors may become productive and creative users of the space.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-04380895 links the museum to the rest of the city through a pedestrian footbridge to Tähtitorninvuori Park and a promenade along the port, including a food hall and a market during the warm months. The museum programs are housed in pavilion-scale buildings with charred timber facades.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-121371443 drapes a skin of textured glass panels over a bar-like, two-story interior structure, creating an environmentally sustainable public space between the facade and the gallery volumes, with natural light diffused throughout. The intelligent glass wrapper uses technology such as Nanogel glazing and rollable thermal shutters.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-1128435973 creates two facilities in dialogue with each other. The ground floor is an adaptive reuse of the existing Makasiini Terminal, conceived as a public space that extends the pedestrian boardwalk into the building. This is a place for education, civic activity, and incubating ideas. The second floor is an exhibition hall on stilts, which hovers above the terminal building, partly removed from everyday life.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Guggenheim Museum Names Six Helsinki Finalists
Finalist GH-5059206475 reuses the laminated wood structure of the Makasiini Terminal to rebuild a wooden volume that exactly follows the geometry of the original, and preserves the current views from the park and the adjacent buildings. Within this structure are 31 rooms: eight of them measuring 20 x 20 m, 18 of them 6.5 x 6.5 m, four of them 10 x 10 m, and one 40 x 100 m.

Image courtesy Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

Finalist GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles gathered around a cathedral-like central space.

The Guggenheim Museum has chosen six finalists in the competition to design its planned Helsinki outpost. The museum announced the six names at a press conference in Helsinki this morning. It also released six sets of renderings, but kept the names and the images apart, noting that “under EU procurement rules the concepts must remain anonymous until the competition concludes.” The finalists will now refine their schemes, with a March deadline; the museum expects to announce its selection in June.

The six schemes range from “a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles, gathered around a cathedral-like central space” to a two-story building draped in “an intelligent glass wrapper.”

To its credit, the Guggenheim also released a report on its selection process. The report notes that when the jurors met in Helsinki last month to deliberate (after having had online access to the entries), chair Mark Wigley, former dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, urged them to “look for schemes which extended or exceeded the brief.” (Some entries, according to the report, had already been “quarantined” for not meeting competition criteria, but the jury then “retrieved and reconsidered” some of those red-lighted entries.)

The finalists are: AGPS Architecture Ltd. (Zurich and Los Angeles); Asif Khan Ltd. (London); Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (New York, Barcelona, and Sydney); Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050 (Stuttgart); Moreau Kusunoki Architect (Paris); and SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid and Western Australia). Although six of the 11 jurors are Finnish, none of the finalists is from Finland—not surprising, given that the competition attracted 1,715 entries from 77 countries.

As if to exorcise the ghost of Bilbao, the jurors seemed to steer clear of fussy or “iconic” buildings. Indeed, they went so far as to choose some schemes, according to their report, “whose outward form will only emerge in the second phase” of the competition. Instead, the focus was on urbanism and on imaginative responses to the program. “The single theme, which linked the chosen six,” the jury report states, “was the impulse to expand the idea of what a museum can be.”

The jurors noted strengths as well as weaknesses. The building with the “intelligent wrapper” (finalist GH-121371443) is “still too diagrammatic,” according to the report, but “had such a density of visual impact that it would draw a nickname from the public.” (Suggestions, anyone?) In the case of the cluster of towers (finalist GH-76091181), the jury questioned the need for nine elevators.