Helsinki Guggenheim Museum | Carlo Rivi

The New Guggenheim Museum was thought to become a significant landmark of the Helsinki harbour.

The site is at the end of a sequence of building facades that belong to the city center, where the city structure ends and a park start to rise a small hill.

The new museum will rise up too, in order to leave a visual break between itself and the city facade sequence to let the Tahititornin Vuori Park be part of the harbour landscape.

The project is articulated in two parts: the exhibition building and a platform. The platform defines the outdoor spaces in a terrace facing the sea and in a birch garden that will be used for outdoor exhibitions.

In the entrance floor are placed the service funcitons for the visitors: ticket and information desk, museum store, cafe, restaurant and classrooms.

The entrance floor is completely open with windows walls facing the surround.

The volume is composed by two systems. One is the exhibition spaces which is closed with blind walls, the other is the lobbies and circulation spaces which are opened toward the harbour and the city views.

At the first floor a large lobby welcome the visitors. Here begins the exhibition system.

The spaces are organized around the central distribuition part of the building.

A sort of continuity is given with a system of spaces overlapping and overlooking each other in order to create different kind of spaces with different heights and different point of view.

This system rise along the building to reach the ceiling natural light of the last floor.

Every exhibition floor has its own lobby until the last floor where the lobby space rise even more and open itself toward the sky.

In the ground floor will be placed the conference room and all the technical, service and storage spaces.

The museum will be built with precast concrete elements with a light colour stone cladding. The interior surfaces will be mainly in wood and white plaster.