competition entry from SYSTEMarchitects
2014
Finland is a land perforated by lakes and rivers. Those lakes and rivers are further perforated by islands. These boundaries between water and land, wilderness and civilization, shape the entire country: not just in the gentile curves of the actual geologic features, but in the ways that roads must bend, forests grow, and cities evolve in response to them. And this pervasive, shifting interplay shapes the imagination of the Finnish people as thoroughly as it shapes their physical world.
guggenheimKANJONI doesn’t just mimic but magnifies the experience of the Finnish landscape through a concentration of the landscape’s two most striking features: the perforations of water and land, and the rare but exquisite northern light.
The group of interlocking building forms are connected by public paths of circulation that draw in foot traffic from ferries, trams, roads, and sidewalk, much like the rivers that connect Finland’s lakes. But the twisting geometry is also calculated to flood these river valleys with direct light as the sun moves through the sky in all seasons, turning the entire site into a celestial clock. The building is in evolution with the movement of the sun.
The surface of the site itself is perforated, and out of these perforations grow features resembling reeds, or great Finnish timber, reaching through the floor to support the roof. Built on pontoons, these supports rise and fall with the Helsinki tides, as does the roof itself, providing constant incremental shifts in motion and light, which falls through the roof in dappled patterns reminiscent of the light through trees in the Finnish wilderness.
These roof perforations are precisely calculated relative to the angle of the sun not just on each day, but for every moment of each day, to draw in the maximum light possible based on the orientation of the building to the sun. The resulting changes in light are dramatic: when visitors leave a room, the light will be noticeably different from when they entered. The shafts of light that fall through these perforations highlight the fact that urban spaces can also be a form of wilderness, as they create divisions in the space that are recognizably urban, but, because of their irregular edges, still wild. The surfaces of the building itself are reminiscent both of Finland’s jagged geologic edges of river, sea, rock, and of the smooth curves of the Finnish roads that lead through them, with the same light creating different effects as it falls on the jagged or the smooth.