Art Forest is our proposal for a new Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki, Finland.
We seek to create an alternative to a museum experience that has become all too prescribed
and force-fed, subordinated to earphone listening, map following, and assembly line herding.
Art Forest is therefore an art treasure hunt set in a Nordic forest in the middle of the city and
harbor, a forest, which extends from its larger adjacent neighbor.
Visitors are encouraged to wander and chance upon sculptural and installation work in this art
forest. As such, the design is composed of a series of intertwined layers: a groundscape of
excavated gallery spaces and courtyards, a sinuous green roof of outdoor spaces set amidst
tree canopies, and a forest of trees weaving through the varying layers. Distributed galleries
create variable options for passage, with views of the harbor ubiquitous throughout the upper
canopy walk.
 

Natural light is filtered through this canopy of large 120'-tall native trees, animating and
illuminating the gallery spaces below with an ever-changing play of silhouettes. A sensation of
being outside replaces that of being hermetically sealed in a white box.
Our design builds off of the original Peggy Guggenheim canal-front residence at the Palazzo
Venier dei Leoni in Venice, extrapolating the original intent of a simple waterfront gallery with
a garden terrace set atop.
Our design also draws from the ideas and ambitions of earlier un-built proposals sympathetic
to nature, including the reconstructed nature / hill of Jean Nouvel’s temporary Guggenheim in
Tokyo, Hans Hollein’s excavated Guggenheim in Salzburg, and the underwater Amazonian
jungle of Jean Nouvel’s Guggenheim Rio in the Atlantic.
Our proposal is an attempt to create a project sensitive to the unique cultural and
environmental conditions of Finland, while having an international appeal to visitors from
around the world.