HELSINKI.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s immersive exhibition Guggenheim Helsinki Now: Six Finalist Designs Unveiled will open to the public on Saturday, April 25, at the Kunsthalle Helsinki in Finland, revealing for the first time the fully developed designs from which a winner will be selected in the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. Visitors to the free exhibition will be able to explore and imagine the possibilities proposed by the six finalist teams, view fifteen designs newly announced as honorable mentions by the jury, and interact with installations that present analyses and interpretations of the data compiled from the record-setting 1,715 submissions to this open, international architectural competition. A concurrent series of public programs, designed to engage a range of age groups, will offer additional opportunities for the public to learn about and discuss the ideas and issues raised by this unprecedented initiative.

At the core of the exhibition are the six designs that the independent, eleven-member competition jury unanimously selected to be finalists in the competition for a proposed Guggenheim museum in Helsinki. The architectural teams behind the proposals had from December 2014 until April 2015 to develop the designs further in response to feedback from the jury and insights gained from an in-depth briefing in Helsinki. The exhibition Guggenheim Helsinki Now makes available to the public the six fully developed designs, including much of the information that will be presented to the jury next month when it meets to select a winner.

Visitors to the exhibition can engage with the finalist designs in a variety of ways, including the Matchmaker Game, an app that was custom-developed for Guggenheim Helsinki Now by American data scientist and taste researcher Hugo Liu (principal scientist for eBay), which pairs players with one of the six designs based on a series of personality-driven questions. A special section of the exhibition, developed for the Guggenheim by the Finnish architect and theorist Martti Kalliala in collaboration with Liu, presents an experimental analysis of contemporary museum architecture, pairing human and artificial intelligence to interpret the competition archive as a data set. The exhibition will acknowledge by name the more than 1,200 participating architects who have elected to be publicly credited. Full submission content from the 1,715 Stage One entries is available for further analysis and study on the competition website, designguggenheim.org/stageonegallery. In addition, more than 500 entries have been made available by the competitors as open-source material under Creative Commons licenses for download and public use at the Guggenheim Helsinki GitHub web page.

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said, “We hope this exhibition and its programs will inspire the Finnish public to engage with the possibilities of a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki, and to think about the potential of a prominent site on their waterfront. We are proud that the Guggenheim has generated these innovative approaches to the role of art and architecture in the future cityscape. We are especially grateful for the cooperation of the City of Helsinki, which decided to make the site available, and for the endorsement of the local supporters who made this competition possible. Now, through this exhibition, we offer the public an opportunity to dive into the kind of thinking that the jury will do as it prepares to choose the winning design.”

Guggenheim Helsinki Now: Six Finalist Designs Unveiled is curated by Troy Conrad Therrien, Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives, with Ashley Mendelsohn, Project Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

“In choosing the six finalists, the jury looked for designs that expanded the idea of what a museum could be,” said Therrien. “The competition is a catalyst to think differently about architecture and cities—and so is the exhibition. It does much more than simply present these designs. It aspires to promote an active dialogue with the citizens of Finland.”

Finalist Designs
Guggenheim Helsinki Now presents the final 3D building models and drawings developed by the six finalist teams: AGPS Architecture Ltd. (Zurich, Switzerland and Los Angeles, United States of America), Asif Khan Ltd. (London, United Kingdom), Fake Industries Architectural Agonism (New York, United States of America; Barcelona, Spain; and Sydney, Australia), Haas Cook Zemmrich STUDIO2050 (Stuttgart, Germany), Moreau Kusunoki Architectes (Paris, France), and SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid, Spain and Western Australia). In accordance with European Union procurement rules, the finalist designs have not been matched to the teams and this information will not be known to the jury or the public until the winner has been selected.

Also on view are designs chosen by the jury for honorable mention, by the firms ACXT-IDOM (Bilbao, Spain), BUBE (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York, United States of America), Francisco Jorquera – Elena Campos (Palma de Mallorca, Spain), Helsinki Zurich Architecture Office Ltd. (Helsinki, Finland and Zurich, Switzerland), Ja Architecture Studio (Toronto, Canada), KUTONOTUK (Virginia, United States of America), Labics (Rome, Italy), Mark Hackett Architect (Belfast, United Kingdom), No.mad Arquitectos (Madrid, Spain), Nug Architects (Barcelona, Spain), Nuno Brandão Costa (Porto, Portugal), Projekt Praga (Warsaw, Poland), Studio Fountainhead + MGG (Copenhagen, Denmark), and Viar Estudio Arquitectura (Getxo, Spain). The identities of the honorable mention firms are made public in accordance with European Union procurement rules and with the permission of the teams.