Winner revealed: Guggenheim Helsinki competition
The winning design for Guggenheim Helsinki, Art in the City by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes.
The garden courtyard in the winning design for Guggenheim Helsinki, Art in the City by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes.
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ flexible design allows for both indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces.
The north square in Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ winning design for Guggenheim Helsinki.
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ design for Guggenheim Helsinki is part of a new cultural core that is linked to the rest of the city.
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ design is based on a sympathetic approach to the context and nature of Helsinki.
The charred timber facade of the proposed buildings by Moreau Kusunoki Architectes represent the process of regeneration that occurs through forest burn.
Moreau Kusunoki Architectes’ drawing of their winning design for Guggenheim Helsinki.
Finalist: Helsinki Five by Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050. Five towers form a shimmering beacon on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Finalist: Quiet Animal by Asif Khan. The proposed block will have a tactile familiarity like a pet’s fur.
Finalist 47 Rooms by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (Cristina Goberna, Urtzi Grau), Jorge Lopez Conde, Carmen Blanco, Alvaro Carrillo. The design is inspired by Helsinki as a city of interiors.
Finalist: AGPS Architecture. The design acknowledges the industrial past of the site.
Finalist: SMAR Architecture Studio. The design will include an internal ‘street’ that can be used all year round in Helsinki.
A design centred on a lighthouse tower clad in charred timber has won the Guggenheim Helsinki design competition.
Designed by Paris-based Moreau Kusunoki Architectes, the scheme, called Art in the City, comprises a cluster of independent volumes that allows both indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. The defining lighthouse feature is intended to offer a different perspective of Helsinki.
The proposed buildings will be clad in charred timber facades, a Japanese building technique, which in this instance is intended to represent the process of forest regeneration through burning.
“The design [is] deeply respectful of the site and setting, creating a fragmented, non-hierarchical, horizontal campus of linked pavilions where art and society could meet and inter-mingle,” said the jury.
The architects, French duo Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki, may be relatively unknown internationally, but they come from a distinguished pedigree of museum and gallery architects. Prior to establishing their studio in 2011, the pair practiced in Tokyo. Hiroko Kusunoki worked for Shigeru Ban and Nicolas Moreau practised with SANAA and Kengo Kuma.
As first prize winner, Moreau Kusunoki Architectes was awarded €100,000.
The competition for Guggenheim Helsinki solicited 1,715 submissions from around the world. The designs were all anonymously assessed and six finalists were chosen in December 2014. The finalists further developed their designs in response to feedback from the jury, and then presented their stage two designs in April 2015.
Each runner-up received €55,000. See all the finalists designs here.
