Guggenheim Helsinki, 47 Rooms by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism
We did not win, yet being one of the six shortlisted teams in the second phase of the largest architectural competition in history profoundly changed our practice. The Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition, launched in 2014, attracted 1,715 entries to a global event organized by Malcolm Reading Consultants for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Following the model of the now-longgone heroic competitions that shaped a generation of practices in the 1990s, this one was open, had a jury of peers, involved a significant civic building, and instantly became a chapter in the annals of architectural culture.
As media outlets around the world featured the competition, our practice received unprecedented international exposure. We suddenly found ourselves in a double controversy: while renowned practitioners addressed the shortcomings of architectural competitions, support for the project itself was under interrogation in Helsinki. When we visited the city in January 2015, our conversations with politicians, anonymous citizens and all sorts of interested parties became a crash course in the management of complex civic projects, an essential lesson for the work we later developed in projects such as the velodrome for Medellín.
The competition’s second phase became a transnational enterprise involving consultants and local partners in three different continents and multiple time zones. The experience – as banal as it might seem after 2020, a year of COVIDinduced working-from-home and Zoom meetings – reorganized our emergent practice. It paved the way for projects like the library we are building in Milan from Sydney, which includes partners in Chile, Germany and Italy, engineers in Spain and the United Kingdom, and endless virtual meetings involving at least three different languages. Guggenheim Helsinki is partially responsible for what we are now. We did not win, and the winning scheme was never built.