Description

At a location as prominent as it was problematic from an urban-planning perspective, surrounded by important buildings but on a main street, the new art museum was to be a cultural and political monument as well as an architectural one. Steven Holl rose to this challenge by designing a building described by the jury as “enigmatically sculptural,” whose high-tech skin (aluminium, titanium zinc, and shimmering green glass) sets it apart from its surroundings and allows it to shine even when the sky is overcast. According to Holl, its unusual form – provoking a wealth of associations (ranging from a cornucopia or a banana to a stranded whale) was the result of its mirroring the curve of the solar trajectory during the building’s opening hours. The architect himself called his project, whose form develops out of the intersection of a right-angled and a curved volume, Chiasma (in Finnish, Kiasma) – a term adopted from biology to denote the cross-over of two strands (optic nerves or chromosomes) which Holl uses here to refer not only to the form of his museum, but also to its function and its urban situation. The strikingly curved five-storey volume and the somewhat lower wing with an essentially orthogonal form meet exactly at the spot where a public passage leads through the complex.

The entrance into the museum building, 132 metres long and 28 metres wide, lies between the two wings on the southern side, where a ravine-like hall lit from above leads visitors downwards with an elegant sweep through a funnel-shaped form which then brings them to the upper levels via a gently climbing ramp. Of varying sizes, the exhibition rooms on the upper floors of the curving main wing – although arranged more or less in a sequence – have very unusual forms. They receive natural light coming in variously through ceiling openings and slits in the curving walls. The introverted atmosphere thus created, from time to time seeming almost religious, is relativized only by a few carefully staged views of the cityscape.

Architecture and Urbanism 277/1993, pp. 64-71 (Andrew MacNair) and 335/1998, pp. 16-39 (Yehuda Safran) • The Architectural Review 1218/1998, pp. 46-53 (Annette LeCuyer) • Baumeister 9/1998, pp. 26-33 (Wolfgang Jean Stock) • Bauwelt 10/1998, pp. 476-483 (Mathias Remmele) • Sandro Marpillero, “Construction of Space”, in: Daidalos 67/1998, pp. 18-25 • Domus 810/ 1998, pp. 12-25 (Dietmar Steiner) • El Croquis 93/1998, pp. 50-85 • Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 1998 • Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York, 1998, pp. 52-55 • Luca Basso Peressut, musei. architetture 1990-2000, Milan, 1999, pp. 248-255 • James Grayson Trulove, Designing the new museum. Building a new destination, Gloucester/MA, 2000, pp. 40-49

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.