Ensamble Studio

Guggenheim museum . Helsinki

Ensamble Studio . + Malcolm Reading

"UNFINISHED MUSEUM for Guggenheim Helsinki" emphasizes openness and flexibility as key qualities of the 21st century museum and establishes a strong relationship with the city and its citizens, aiming to affect the urban experience.

With a privileged location at South Harbor’s waterfront, the proposal intensifies the dialogue between the landscapes that meet on the site and extends the park into the port, merging water, vegetation and urban ground. In this setting, the museum is conceived as an open three-dimensional urban system with the capacity to be actively developed, upgraded or completed over time. The system is defined by a primary framework at urban scale that resolves the main structure and infrastructure and inside it - as in the empty plots of a city grid - many architectures and permutations of the private and public realms can take place according to needs. In this new exciting scenario of the city, the most singular values of the place are enhanced, provoking as a result an architecture that is more public, shared, transparent, infrastructural, constructively efficient, multi-performative and thus, strategically unfinished.