The Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition

A team of seven designers from Centerbrook submitted an entry for an innovative, multidisciplinary museum of art and design in Helsinki, Finland. The Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the city reserved a prominent waterfront site for the proposed museum at Eteläsatama, or South Harbor area, an urban space of great national and cultural significance that is close to the historic city center and immediately visible to visitors arriving by sea.

The Foundation received 1,715 entries; ours was GH-6043427870. The jury selected six teams in October of 2014 to develop their designs and a winner was eventually announced in June. The Centerbrook team consisted of Mark Simon, Jim Childress, Katie Roden, Justin Hedde, Caitlin Taylor, Elizabeth Hedde, and Aaron Emma.

Our challenge was to create a local identity for a global museum. The team researched Finland to understand the qualities that make the country unique at the scale of the region, city, building, the programmatic, and the person. Straddling the Arctic Circle, Helsinki is a wonderfully unique place with extremely long summer days and cold dark winters. Nearly three-quarters of the country is covered in dense forest and the culture celebrates that fact through their daily activities and their art. We sought to translate these unique qualities into something tangible knowing that the most original buildings are representations of surrounding craft and culture. To quote Charles Moore from his book The Place of Houses:

“Traditions have great power precisely because they present us with possibilities and guides that support invention.”

The project was presented through four posters. Below are our main concepts.

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The Guggenheim Helsinki will join and bolster an existing network of national, regional and local museums.

In a country of dense forest, extensive waterways and many small islands, [our submission] appropriates familiar landscapes to create a new public art space in the city.

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The Museum is a Pavilion in the Park.

The Guggenheim will embrace Helsinki’s rich history of public art. The central secure gallery is surrounded by a publically accessible four-season sculpture park. This public space, along with a harbor front promenade, reconnects the waterfront to Observatory Park.

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The Museum transforms daily and seasonally.

During hours of sunlight, the facade reflects the columnar forest along the waterfront and conceals the gallery’s contents. In darkness, the gallery’s interior lights illuminate and reveal the iconic ceiling form. The dynamic contours of sky and sea formally influence the gallery ceiling, which acts as an iconic beacon in darkness to draw visitors from across the city and harbor.

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The Museum is a new hearth for the city of Helsinki.

Heated and powered with biomass energy harvested from Finland’s extensive forests, the public museum will be a refuge during long winter days.

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The building will be constructed using only materials of Finland.

The primary building materials are stone and wood. Locally harvested Baltic Brown Granite flooring collects solar radiation during the day and radiates heat at night into the indoor park. Stone island walls provide thermal mass to moderate temperature swings along the southwest side of the building.

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An entirely flexible naturally lit gallery space.

Its flexible world class exhibition space can support a variety of needs from hosting international traveling exhibitions to providing a platform for Finland’s talented cache of artists. Light colored wood floor and ceiling finishes in the exhibition space provide diffuse light for viewing art.

The typical museum support spaces form a chain of separate stone-clad ‘islands’ that cradle and protect an indoor park to be welcoming in all weather.

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The typical museum support spaces form a chain of separate stone-clad ‘islands’ that cradle and protect an indoor park to be welcoming in all weather.

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Island, meadow and forest figures reconnect the city to the waterfront.

A forest of wooden columns and indigenous tree species blur the edges between inside and outside and evoke the Nordic landscape.