When we awake in the U.S. tomorrow (unless you’re an insomniac or even more of a night owl than I am), the Guggenheim will have announced the six finalists chosen from the 1,717 anonymous submissions in the architectural competition for its proposed Helsinki satellite facility (which has not yet received government approval). The decision of the 11 jurors is to be revealed at 11:15 a.m., Helsinki time (4:15 a.m. in New York).
You can check this website to scoop me. I’ll be in conference with my pillow.
In accordance with baffling European Union procurement rules governing this competition, the shortlisted architects will be named but won’t be matched to their designs. So we can all play the parlor game of trying to guess which name goes with which project—a task made harder, if not impossible, by the fact that some (or perhaps even most) of the select six could turn out to be relative unknowns.
A clue to what the jurors were looking for was provided by Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim, quoted in the Helsinki Times as saying: “What the finalist entries all have in common is that they take the environment and users well into consideration.”
Similarly, when asked by Janelle Zara of Architizer about his aspirations for the new Helsinki facility, Troy Conrad Therrien, the Guggenheim’s new curator of architectural and digital initiatives, replied:
For me personally, climate change is at the top of my mind, and this is one of the biggest platforms for architecture to make a statement about that. We get so mired under the heading of sustainability, and I think the Arctic region—Helsinki is below the Arctic Circle, but parts of Finland extend above it—is the next frontier for the discussion on climate change. This is a project that allows us to spark a bigger conversation about urgent things not taken urgently enough by the international community.
Given their country’s “three times gloomier than average” November, I suppose the Finns may indeed be ripe for “discussion on climate change.” But is this what they crave in a new museum?
Therrien will “help organize an exhibition of [the] six shortlisted submissions, to be held in Helsinki in the spring of 2015, and he will play a key role in developing and articulating the programmatic elements of the proposed museum,” according to the Guggenheim’s Nov. 7 press release announcing his appointment.
The winner of the competition is to be announced in June.