The Guggenheim announced the design entry entitled ‘Art in the City‘ – submitted by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes, a young firm founded in Paris in 2011 -, as the winner of the Guggenheim Helsinki competition.
On June 23, 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced the winning design in the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition: a concept that invites visitors to engage with museum artwork and programs across a series of linked pavilions and plazas organized around an interior street. Clad in locally sourced charred timber and glass, the environmentally sensitive building would comprise nine low-lying volumes and one lighthouse-like tower, connected to the nearby Observatory Park by a new pedestrian footbridge and served by a promenade along Helsinki’s South Harbor.
Above, a view of Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’s winning design at the Guggenheim Helsinki Competition. © Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes, the competition’s winners.
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes is led by Hiroko Kusunoki and Nicolas Moreau. Notable projects undertaken by the firm include the Théâtre de Beauvaisis in Beauvais, the House of Cultures and Memories in Cayenne, the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Bourget-du-Lac, and the plaza for the Paris District Court (designed by Renzo Piano) at the Porte de Clichy.
As the winner of the competition, Moreau Kusunoki will receive a cash award of €100,000 (approximately US$109,000). An award of €55,000 (approximately US$60,000) will be given to each of the five finalist teams: AGPS Architecture Ltd. (Zurich and Los Angeles; GH-1128435973), named runner-up by the jury; Asif Khan Ltd. (London; GH-121371443); Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Cristina Goberna, Urtzi Grau), Jorge Lopez Conde, Carmen Blanco, Alvaro Carrillo (New York, Barcelona, and Sydney; GH-5059206475); Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050 (Stuttgart; GH-76091181); and SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid and Western Australia; GH-563168177.
Below, you can see the Guggenheim Helsinki’s six finalist entries.
The finalists proposed a range of responses to the competition brief, as illustrated in the synopses below:
GH-76091181 comprises a ring of slender, sculptural towers faced with timber shingles, reminiscent of vernacular architecture, gathered around a cathedral-like central space. The towers, with their play of light and shadow, create an architectural beacon, visible by land or sea, while the central space, sheltered from extremes of weather yet part of the quayside, provides an exceptional new site for public events on the waterfront. Exhibition galleries are housed in timber cabinets stacked within the towers. Bridges connecting the towers offer respite space for visitors to experience art and offer new viewing points over the city and harbor.
Above and cover image: GH-76091181
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved
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. In a critical shift from the idea of a building as a static object to a building that accommodates the flux of daily life, 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.
Above: GH-5631681770
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved
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 treated as independent, fragmentary volumes within this landscape, allowing for a strong integration of outdoor display and event spaces with interior exhibition galleries. The ensemble is made to stand out from afar by being composed around a landmark tower. The use of charred timber in the facade evokes the process of regeneration that occurs when forests burn and then grow back stronger than before.
Above: GH-04380895
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved.
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. In an unusual innovation, the element that makes the building sustainable—the intelligent glass wrapper, which uses technology such as Nanogel glazing and rollable thermal shutters—is also the element that distinguishes the project visually, giving the building an ethereal presence. Within the building, an annex for the work of younger Nordic artists is paired with a market hall, and a service pavilion encloses a sculpture garden.
Above: GH-121371443
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved.
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. The long rectangular volume offers a flexible space for all types of exhibitions and adheres to the notion of a museum as a space apart. Through this dual scheme, the proposed museum could engage its public to co-create value and meaning.
Above: GH-1128435973
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved.
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—essentially an undisturbed network of existing conditions—the project creates 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. This rigid set of spatial conditions is combined with a deliberate distribution of climates based on the program and principles of sustainability, with each room acclimatized independently so that the galleries together form a “thermal onion.”
Above: GH-5059206475
© Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. All rights reserved.
1,715 submissions were received in response to Stage One of the open, anonymous, international, two-stage competition for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Helsinki Museum in Helsinki. Proposals came from 77 countries, according to voluntary data provided by 70 percent of competitors; the United States, Italy, Finland, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan represent the top six countries from which submissions were received.
Text and images courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NYC