The City and the Harbour
SMAR Architecture StudioThe City and the Harbour
The Site
The Design of the new Guggenheim Museum must be seen as an opportunity to create a linked Connection between City and Harbour.- SMAR Architecture Studio
The Program
The Evolution of Museum Space
Museums have changed from institutions where information was directed in only one way: towards the viewer into institutions that are increasingly creating conversations with the viewer.
We need a really radical change in how people use museums now.
We propose a new Experience not only for the visitor, but for the Citizen.
A critical shift from the idea of a building as a static object to a building that can accommodate the flux of daily life, the life of Street Art.
The Extra City Space
We propose a Strategy that could offer back to the City of Helsinki an Extra Space at no additional cost.
An added value for the City that transcends traditional Exhibition Spaces.
We propose an Interior Street, an additional un-programmed space, which is not included in the original brief, that open the building up to citizen’s appropriation, and allow it to remain structurally relevant through the present and well into the future.
The Interior Street, an Extra City Space, proposes a set of Unique Spaces that contains an almost unlimited number of conditions and situations that Public Space could offer to present, to study, (re) contextualize, or even provoke the people that enters it, whatever form it takes.
Gallery Art + Street Art
The translation of the budget into a double space, a combination of 2 programs -The Museum -Gallery Art- and The Extra Space -Street Art- in a single building allows us to explore the relationship between 2 structures. Using both factors, we had the chance to add, subtract, divide... We decided to multiply.
The un-programmed Extra Space and its structural flexibility prompts citizens to engage with it as productive and creative users of space.
The long, interior shape will contain the Interior Street while its outer surface defines the Museum space, left between the form and the envelope.