Guggenheim Helsinki Now architectural exhibit opens Apr 25

PanARMENIAN.Net - Guggenheim Helsinki Now, which is billed as an immersive architectural exhibition, opens to the public on Saturday, April 25 in the Finnish capital, giving the public the chance to discover—and perhaps be seduced by—the six shortlisted designs. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Helsinki (25 April-16 May), which is free, includes the finalists as well as 15 designs that were awarded “honourable mentions” by the jurors. They were chosen from the 1,715 submissions to the open international competition launched last year. The 11-strong jury is due to announce the winner in June, The Art Newspaper reports.

Troy Conrad Therrien, the Guggenheim’s newly appointed curator of architecture and digital initiatives, who has co-organised the exhibition, says that the show aims to be accessible to the public. Everyone in Helsinki has an opinion on the building, Therrien says, which will be on the city’s waterfront if the project is approved.

To convey how the six buildings might look in situ, the exhibition includes supersized panoramic images of the proposed designs, which wrap around the galleries. The images are four metres high and seven metres wide, so Therrien hopes that viewers will feel immersed in the panorama. “The exhibition had to be experiential,” he says, so it is not limited to models, sketches and text.

As a curator of digital initiatives, he has also made sure that the data generated by “the largest architectural competition in history” is included, by enlisting the help of a “data guru” who has co-developed a novel digital extension to the exhibition. Ebay’s principal scientist, Hugo Liu, together with the Finnish architect Martti Kalliala, came up with the Matchmaker Game, an app that gives the designs “personalities” so that players can find one that best fits their own. “It’s like Tinder for buildings,” Therrien says.

None of the six finalist teams are Scandinavian, nor do they include well-known museum architects. Their concepts for the €130m, around 18,500 sq. m building should be “informed by Nordic ideals of openness and accessibility”, as well as having landmark potential. Their designs include a cluster of timber-clad towers, shed-like spaces with a tall, pink neon Guggenheim sign, a big, low translucent box and another inspired by a multi-room sauna. Open competitions are a Finnish tradition, Therrien says, that have kickstarted young architects’ careers in the past. Five of the architectural practices are less than ten years old.

The six finalists are: AGPS Architecture (Zurich and Los Angeles); Asif Khan (London); Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (New York, Barcelona, Sydney); Haas Cook Zemmrich Studio2050 (Stuttgart); Moreau Kusunoki Architectes (Paris); and SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid). The designs, which have not been matched to the teams, will remain anonymous to the jury and the public until the winner is announced.