This design is based on establishing vicarious relations to the local context of Helsinki, and to the constellation of other Guggenheim Museums around the world, while at the same time withdrawing from those contexts in order to create a discrete and internalized world for art. This withdrawal is intended to incite and confound speculation as to the building’s origins, and create a sense of mysterious depth beyond its superficial qualities.
The project is a vertical museum. Verticality alludes to its civic function, but also maintains the building’s distinction from the horizontality of the infrastructural buildings and cruise liners of the adjacent port zone. The mass of the building is crystalline; it is made up of both large and small crystal objects collected into a composite, irreducible shape. Its silhouette becomes more defined towards its base, where it stands lightly on the ground on crystal tips and faces. This gives the sense that the building is dislodged or movable. The ground it stands on is in fact another building which further defers landing of the crystalline mass. This ground-building is a reified shadow cast from the mass above. Architecture, in this way, begins to produce its own context.
Hidden inside the crystal mass is a strange object made of dark Finnish wood. This object is nested within a vast and vertical space; it is sometimes tightly-fit and sometimes loosely-fit to the outer shell of the building. The interstitial space becomes a flexible civic realm for opening events, symposia, and lectures. While visitors in this space are inside the building, it is also true that they are still outside of something else; separation between world and interior is delayed.
Exhibition spaces are located both within the nested object and inside the thick poché spaces of the outer shell. Visitors ascend up into the Museum via escalators embedded into the shell and through the central core in the inner object. Bridges and stairs cross over the interstitial space, connecting outer and inner exhibition spaces. As visitors circulate, they find themselves momentarily suspended above a deep, almost geological chasm. Rather than experiencing a fluid continuum of art, visitors experience this Museum as a set of discrete experiences or leaps between realities.
The interstitial space is naturally daylit but can be darkened for events. It acts as a thermal buffer for the Museum, like a winter coat. All galleries are tightly temperature and humidity controlled. Inner galleries are artificially lit to allow for flexible curation and multi-media art forms, while outer galleries offer a mixture of artificial and daylit spaces for painting and sculpture. The outer envelope of the shell is primarily a metal panel rainscreen system with limited zones of perforated metal panel in front of a high-performance glass curtain wall.
Client: The Guggenheim Foundation/ City of Helsinki Type: Fine Art Museum Floor Area: 15,000 SM
