Artificial landscape

The Guggenheim Helsinki is based on the desire to provide a social and cultural place, to residents and visitors. It’s a real public space that is a continuity of a walk and that arouses curiosity by creating an architectural and landscaping event while promoting its context. The project brings to bear rather special attention to the perspective, both physical and mental in search of the «Genius loci». The project plays on the vertical and horizontal, as a sacred place which is spread along the waterfront. It creates an artificiallandscape. The architectural proposal works with the power of the so-called Nordic atmosphere.The proposal for the new museum creates a threshold for art, a bridge between city and museum, architecture and landscape, old and new.

Concept design

The proposal consists of a series of vertical layers, which define the main volumes created by different galleries. Glass walls workswith transparency and opacity.Walls define the museum and create a series of interconnecting galleries. Galleries are parallel from each other and to the quayside which can be developed in an art walk. The structure offers fissures and provides light.

The building is composed like a cathedral with a nave and aisles. This project tries to touch the beauty, the purity and the powerful of a spiritual place.Walls alternately delineate the site boundaries, inviting the public to enter and providing views through the building.

The heart of the building is composed by an horizontal compressed lobby. It is penetrated by an atrium creating a major event space for the city and provides views into the galleries where you can find a one scale piece of art for example. This atrium illuminates the ground floor and welcomes the visitors.Upstairs, the visitor can enjoy the various galleries. Exhibition galleries are flexible, contiguous spaces that can be combined or divided as needed. Outdoor spaces for the displays of sculpture and architectural interventions are places between galleries.

Concrete beams are held at varying heights to create variations in scale, proportion and enclosure, providing a diversity of day lighting conditions and curatorial opportunities.

Collections storage and management offices are on an adjacent and smallest aisle.

This building is a simultaneous act of enclosure and invitation, allowing the landscape to flow through the entire site, while tenuously capturing and containing rooms of art.

Sustainability

Bioclimatic strategy developed allows to get as close as possible to the comfort zone. The aim is to reduce the ecological footprint, and generate architectural value, quality and use an environment for the exhibition of art works with a wider audience.

In the interstices of the concrete beams is membranes air cushion.It reduces the burden of snow when the air in the upper chamber is at the temperature to melt the snow. The supply of light is controlled by changing the distance between the marks of the film.

The interior space with its wooden surfaces, and movable panels stands in stark contrast to the almost monolithic appearance of the exterior.