Melt
Helsinki, Finland
Xefirotarch
Design Team: Ivan Bernal, Andrew Cheu
Helsinki Guggenheim Museum Competition
Summer 2015
The role of an Art Museum is not just to be a museum, but a beacon of culture and society, It’s achievements and aspirations. It represents a city, a country, a history and a future.
This proposal for the Guggenheim Helsinki’s museum has the aspiration to be a permanent seismographer of society and its culture and as such architecture can be updated revisited modified. Permanence tells us less about architecture and more about society’s selfimage of permanence even if they are not.
Our proposal point to the reinvigorated notion of multiplicity and variation of single entities, we like to argue that this is where we are in the presence of true architecture, because they are works about the making of architecture, as “just architecture,” and hopefully without other meaning or reading that a provocation a friction between the exiting city, the park and the new museum in it.
The collection of exhibition wood masses and the glass boxes, which surround them, are part of this notion of architecture. They are perhaps what the architectural idea is at this point. What is captured is time itself being tracked. Maybe that is why the internal masses actually works because it captures architecture the way we really see it, which is partial and distracted (and by the way, the same goes for architecture we would rather forget, in the same way that we would like to get rid of some images of our own personal past, and many times we do: but you cannot get ride of the consequences of that particular piece of time.... sometimes was just bad hair or bad clothes or bad cameras, or bad photographers.)
This proposal for the Guggenheim Helsinki’s museum has the aspiration to be a permanent seismographer of society and its culture and as such architecture can be updated revisited modified. Permanence tells us less about architecture and more about society’s selfimage of permanence even if they are not.
Our proposal point to the reinvigorated notion of multiplicity and variation of single entities, we like to argue that this is where we are in the presence of true architecture, because they are works about the making of architecture, as “just architecture,” and hopefully without other meaning or reading that a provocation a friction between the exiting city, the park and the new museum in it.
The collection of exhibition wood masses and the glass boxes, which surround them, are part of this notion of architecture. They are perhaps what the architectural idea is at this point. What is captured is time itself being tracked. Maybe that is why the internal masses actually works because it captures architecture the way we really see it, which is partial and distracted (and by the way, the same goes for architecture we would rather forget, in the same way that we would like to get rid of some images of our own personal past, and many times we do: but you cannot get ride of the consequences of that particular piece of time.... sometimes was just bad hair or bad clothes or bad cameras, or bad photographers.)
Plans
Skinning Diagram
Cross Section
Longitudinal Section