Stage One of the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition reeled in a whopping 1,715 entries from 77 countries. Although the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation officially launched the competition this past summer, the idea of proposing a new Guggenheim Museum for the city of Helsinki has already stirred plenty of debate...Most of the entries received were from the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and of course, Finland. — bustler.net
We picked out a few fairly promising submissions and more, uh, interesting ones.
Check out more of our picks and other details on Bustler.
33 Comments
This is what happened to architecture when the pencil was replaced with a mouse.
Barely any thoughtful entries...except mine of course.
Good God! Has anyone here been on a real jury - how do you even begin?
I'd probably come up with some arbitrary rule - reject every building with wood panels - just to filter things down.
Seriously?
Darkman ^ there's an old-fashioned hand-crafted design for you!
We have a winner.
Look up the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright or Michelangelo or even Frank Gehry.
Maybe they should just go back to Gehry... Ha. That's the Guggenheim brand now.
This all looks like DS+R OMA grad student work
On the positive side, it's lots of unpaid work, but perhaps inspiring to see lots of participation and energy into making a building.....maybe there is a great one in all of the shape making. At least talking about the politics of this this is better than talking about abstract politics that have substituted for architecture debate. Now we can finally see where architecture is at the moment. And it needs work.
Surely somewhere in the submissions there are entries that are thoughtful proposals for habitable and emotionally resonant space. Competition entries, of course, always require the gasp-inducing flashy image. But that's not design, that's styling. It's Wow! Huh? not Huh? Wow!
I'd like to look through some of these to see if any of them are proposing a building that's more than a glamour shot.
In the meantime, pleasepleaseplease someone who is working from home today: shove an Idaho potato into a cheese grater and snap a picture of it to replicate the cover proposal?
There is everything from a stage set for Jurassic Park 12 to a crashed spaceship to a deconstruction of the Sydney Opera House to a Star Wars sand crawler to Noah's Ark and everything in between.
Seems to me that entertainment culture has won and the rest of humanity has lost.
that's not design, that's styling. It's Wow! Huh? not Huh? Wow!
Donna, you left out the 'Duh'. Interesting to contrast these proposals with the thread on the Portland Building.
That being said I think the best one is the tree-covered roofscape simply because it is the least pretentious and most sensitive to current environmental concerns. Although without the chalet on top of course.
Unfortunately the jury is Mark Wigley and Jeannie Gang so subtlety will not be a virtue here. Will probably go for the whiz bang factor.
The potato is in play.
I vote for the one that looks like a potato.
Yeah let the potatoe thing win. Seriously, who has the time to flip through all of these and state that any or none of those is good? I feel sorry for the 99% architects that will have done all that hard work just to end up on a thumbnail page filled with mediocre project next to theirs. These idea competitions are so 90's.There's no way any young practice will "emerge" (such a 90's word too) from these. When you think about the money Guggenheim has saved (or even earned? was there a fee to enter) on the back of young architects it's even more outrageous!
got this far short of sending it in.
Did you guys see this image of FOG flipping off a reporter who asked him if he thought his work was "too showy"? I loooove it.
http://gizmodo.com/frank-gehry-thinks-architecture-today-is-pure-shit-1649914255
Here's the thing (and it's not like I'm the first person to say this ever): When Gehry did the Guggenheim he was doing what he already did in his ouvre, just on a bigger scale. It was shocking and amazing to see something so bizarre be rendered so large, and it was a huge success.
But it spawned this idea that ALL architecture must have this huge WOW moment - that any big, crazy-looking monument (shiny-icon-with-a-hole-in-it to quote vado retro) will automatically be good architecture. In a competition it's even moreso: the ones we remember are the eye-catching ones like a potato shoved in a cheese grater.
If the architect of the potato has been doing small potatoes (heh) for years, and seeing local and growing success, and gaining respect as a practitioner of dangling archi-potatoes, then this proposal is another step along the path of a career that may eventually be lauded as significant. If the potato is an attempt to catch the eye of a jury, via the "fling enough shit until something sticks" method of design....well that's a different story.
Great link Donna.
Let me tell you one thing. In this world we are living in, 98 percent of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit. There's no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are damn buildings and that's it. Once in a while, however, there's a small group of people who does something special. Very few. But good god, leave us alone! We are dedicated to our work. I don't ask for work. I don't have a publicist. I'm not waiting for anyone to call me. I work with clients who respect the art of architecture. Therefore, please don't ask questions as stupid as that one.
I wonder which 2% of his own work Gehry thinks rises above pure shit. On the other hand, at 2% I think he's being generous.
The good news is that Gehry has seemingly fallen out of favor as the Guggenheim corporate brand.
What does anyone expect? BTW, which one is Frank Gehry's?
my favorite find so far, though I also really like this drawing:
if nothing else, the submissions provide a bit of a sampling of tendencies in representation, and I do have to tip my hat to anyone who bothers to think beyond the 'flashy rendering' to communicate their concept
&
two great entries, entirely opposite in approach and sensibility
I sense something dark in most of the approaches--everyone is competing to get noticed in a little square box on a computer screen. If anything digital media has accelerated the superficiality of magazines. Some of the proposals are interesting, but what exactly do they mean if anything?
I wonder if anyone is reading the descriptions.
Exactly, Darkman.
I read about six of the descriptions and none of them really said much beyond things like "dynamic space" and "new monument" and "bold form".
If anything digital media has accelerated the superficiality of magazines.
But thankfully not anything substantive, like architecture ...
That is the second-largest baked potato I've ever seen.
And, seeing these, it's no wonder people make fun of architects.
Yeah, this competition is bad pr for architects--aimed at only the few that have time and energy to spend...it's no wonder those entries all look like DS+R worshipping grad student GSAPP type nonsense. I read one description about a "scar on the landscape" and laughed.
As for me, I only spent two hours using a discarded model from a previous project as mine was proposing a program more than form.
If only someone challenged the brief....
I think the adverse relationship of digital media vs architecture (and humanity) is the great problem of our time. This is more proof of that.
Most so called critics mindlessly tweet pictures of archijunk but we need a rebellion
as mine was proposing a program more than form
Blasphemy!
Oops. Perhaps if I'd read the directions I would have oriented my project around fascist Koons-style "art"
"Most so called critics mindlessly tweet pictures of archijunk but we need a rebellion."
I wouldn't look to the critics for that. Is abstinence a form of rebellion? How can you track, analyze, and respond to the refusal to participate in these 'meaningless' charades? I agree with Darkman, digital culture's ugly flipside is showing through overwhelmingly more so than any possibilities for contemporary architecture in this compendium of industry standard renderings.
Again, that's why my personal choice is to look at this as an opportunity to assess directions in representational strategies/techniques more so than anything else. How I see it, the slick 'photo-realistic' render as the product of architecture, is almost by necessity the default representational mode of the formalist. Where form-heavy entries deviate from this 'norm', I am seeing all sorts of concepts at play in the project. Where form takes a backseat, I am seeing all sorts of differences in representational choices.
one more thing to note - I read a few of the descriptions, and I think doing so hurt my perception of the projects. It's not even the pseudo-intellectual language that's turning me off, it's the seemingly absolute inability of the entrants to say something - anything - meaningful and enticing about the project within the constraints of one paragraph.
potato in a glass cube
looks like mr potato head after being brutally assaulted by a bunch of arch students.
Picture / Word association game:
#1 Mr potato stuck in a cubist Mime's Box
#2 Wooden Bowls
#3 Baskets full of laundry
#4 Lasagna
#5 Barnacles
#6 Surprise I have no design concept!
#7 Helsinki Bridges Falling down, soon I hope
#8 1950's Amusement park
#9 Very bumpy artificial ski slope
#10 Skate boarder's full pike not a half pike
I also discount the ones that use wood as a gimmick... Wood has its uses for interiors but something of this size isn't a big boat....
Attention Guggenheim Boise. Your potato is loose.
One might say cooked, Vado.
First scheduled exhibit: "S.P.U.D.: Socially Progressive Until Dinner"
I love Potato Salad!
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