Yesterday morning, the city board of Helsinki voted 10-5 in favor of reserving a plot of land for a new Guggenheim museum in the Eteläsatama neighborhood, after rejecting an original $185 million proposal in May 2012. Helsinki city board members announced an upcoming call for entries to develop a relatively small-sized parking lot into the world-renowned Guggenheim Foundation's next major institution. According to news outlets, the city board will hold the site for two years while searching for a suitable design. The Guggenheim has a history of favoring grandiose, formalistic solutions for its museum buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright's expressive spiral design was praised as a deeply personal alternative to modernism, while Frank Gehry's glittering Guggenheim in Bilbao inaugurated an era of urban renewal through investment in mega-projects. Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, photo via But in a post-recession global economy the Gehry model of expensive, ego-driven, and contextually unsympathetic museum design is slowly becoming obsolete. Instead, newer institutions such as Rudy Riciotti's MuCEM in Marseilles and Mecanoo's Kaap Skil, Maritime, and Beachcombers Museum in the Netherlands have found success by approaching design from a more thoughtful, locally sensitive scheme—without the need to implement a "brand aesthetic." ...
Yesterday morning, the city board of Helsinki voted 10-5 in favor of reserving a plot of land for a new Guggenheim museum in the Eteläsatama neighborhood, after rejecting an original $185 million proposal in May 2012. Helsinki city board members announced an upcoming call for entries to develop a relatively small-sized parking lot into the world-renowned Guggenheim Foundation's next major institution. According to news outlets, the city board will hold the site for two years while searching for a suitable design. The Guggenheim has a history of favoring grandiose, formalistic solutions for its museum buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright's expressive spiral design was praised as a deeply personal alternative to modernism, while Frank Gehry's glittering Guggenheim in Bilbao inaugurated an era of urban renewal through investment in mega-projects. Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, photo via But in a post-recession global economy the Gehry model of expensive, ego-driven, and contextually unsympathetic museum design is slowly becoming obsolete. Instead, newer institutions such as Rudy Riciotti's MuCEM in Marseilles and Mecanoo's Kaap Skil, Maritime, and Beachcombers Museum in the Netherlands have found success by approaching design from a more thoughtful, locally sensitive scheme—without the need to implement a "brand aesthetic." ...