Guggenheim Helsinki
Competition Proposal
Helsinki, Finland, 2014
A museum that is simultaneously austere and exuberant, collective and individualistic, dark and light, traditional and progressive, and of the forest and the city.
Four flexible gallery macro-spaces float autonomously above a plaza for education, cultural exchange, dining, and retail, accessible from the main plaza, the water, the road, and the port, open to the public.
Five studios form a centerpiece of this space, where artists-in-residence can be inspired by the museum collection and invigorated by the public through the revelation of their creative process.
The galleries are deliberately elevated above and directed inward from this active urban environment, and link the
viewer to Helsinki’s landscape through large channel glass portholes.
This allows one to concurrently interpret works of art and comprehend the context in which they were created.
The massing of these volumes evokes a synthesis of vernacular and contemporary morphology through the transformation of gabled profiles into sinuous filleted volumes.
