The Guggenheim Helsinki is a sensory stimulating experience that integrates viewing, making, and studying art. The museum becomes an interactive interface that facilitates urban exchanges, spectacle, creative production, and introspective observation. These four spatial intentions sit within a formal logic: a series of aggregated irregular prisms. Because these prisms are carefully bundled together, they read as a system at the urban and building scales. At the scale of the individual, though, these prisms simultaneously create a multiplicity of spatial experiences. Subtle shifts and rotation in the geometry of the prisms create internal voids for circulation, natural light, and visual connection between spaces.
The alternation of solid and void creates new types of spaces for artistic production, interaction, and display. The building provides open, well-lit, capacious spaces for performance, social practice, and interactive art. The boundaries between author, artist, viewer, and observer blur, making the museum visit a performance. Art is not treated as something created ‘elsewhere’ and displayed here. Instead, this museum integrates artistic production. Artists have studio space at the threshold between solid and void. Movement flows through active creative spaces, allowing visitors to closely watch or participate in the creativity.