Helsinki Guggenheim Museum
Helsinki, Finland
2014
In recent decades museum buildings have become the sites of significant and progressive architectural innovation. This proposal fuses this formal tradition with ongoing research into the philosophical discourse of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) developed by philosopher Graham Harman. This discourse, further brought into architecture by ongoing discussions between Harman and Mark Foster Gage, places emphasis on distinct entities rather than their interconnections and relationships. The new 129,000 sq. ft. museum, sited on the urban waterfront in Helsinki, Finland, was designed to be exclusively constructed from “recycled digital materials,”- objects that were randomly downloaded from various online sources but have no intentional existing relationships with one another or larger symbolic agenda. Through the high-resolution recombining, or, “kitbashing” of components, the individual figures were intended to lose any associations of symbolic content in favor of the emergence of a new and highly complex form of architectural aesthetic that mysteriously hints at, but in no way reveals, the curious and varied importance of the artistic contents within.