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From the design entry brief: "Wooden sail ships and museums are kind of containers. Wood material and curving contour lines share the same origin."

The Guggenheim Foundation is going all out with its competition for the Guggenheim Helsinki. And that's a problem.

Is the era of big museums over? That's the question posed by columnist Aaron Betsky in a recent post for Architect. In the column, Betsky expands on his contribution to a new volume called Museums on the Map: 1995–2012, an essay collection assessing the cultural building boom over that period. It's also a period that starts roughly with the construction of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. Some might even go so far as to say this museum triggered the building boom.

"I think that we now realize that the making of stand-alone, expensive, and iconic objects rarely benefit their communities and their arts," Betsky says, summing up the new conventional wisdom on the so-called Bilbao Effect. "Investments that make use of existing facilities—working with, rather than building on top of existing conditions—and energize, rather than merely temporarily creating audiences make more sense."

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"A 90-meter Ouroboros not only help [sic] catlyze the bay area and its surroundings, but also offer [sic] a changeable Mobius with fabulous 360-degree overlooking views overlooking [sic] the city of Helsinki."

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"Symbolic geometry that appears like Northern Lights [...] The geometric solution for the museum detonates a sensorial amplitude, giving the character of permeable building, you can enjoy the wind flowing, the scents and the astonishing panoramas."

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The “Finish Wood” cube dons several roles, that of structure, skin, program and technology.

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> via citylab.com