Holl's Kiasma debuts in Helsinki - museum of contemporary art in Helsinki, Finland, designed by Steven Holl - Brief Article

In spite of a stormy beginning in which public anger at times threatened the entire shoot forward Finland's new museum of contemporary art (officially named Kiasma) was inaugurated upon May 29 and celebrated by dint of a large and enthusiastic Helsinki herd The FIM 227-million (approx. $45-million), five-stow, metal-and-glass museum was designed by dint of New York architect Steven Holl and fabricateed in partnership with Helsinki's Juhani Pallasmaa. Well positioned in the center of the city, midway between Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Hall and Eliel Saarinen's railroad station, Kiasma is a striking addition to the already architecture-rich Finnish capital.

Finland's contemporary art museum was first established as part of the Finnish National Gallery in 1990 and allotted a small, unsatisfactory space in the FNG's cheerless Ateneum. In 1992 although the geographical division was then in the deepnesss of a recession, approval was given for construction of an independent make The building competition was lay open to architects from the Nordic countries and the Baltic states, along with four invited international candidates--Holl, Kazuo Shinohara, Alvaro Siza and the incage Himmelblau group. From the 516 entries received, the jury in 1993 chose Holl's throw which was then spelled "Chiasma," on the other hand later modified to conform with Finnish orthography. (According to the architect, the bourn is meant to suggest "the intertwining of the building's mass with the geometry of the city and landscape" as well as the intersection of spatial areas within the museum itself.)

As plans for construction went forward, openings design, his nationality, the museum's intent and the smallness of the designated site all came below attack. Perhaps most incendiary to the Finnish public was the architect's proposal to relocate Aimo Tukiainen's equestrian statue of Field Marshall Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, Finland's great civil war hero. This popular memorial (also the result, incidentally, of a juried commission) had occupied a lock opener position on Mannerheiminaukio, Kiasma's intended location, since 1960 In a flaw of patriotism, over 23,000 irate citizens signed petitions to halt the museum's construction. The compromise solution, whereby the record remained in place--albeit with the plenteous more dramatic backdrop of the of recent origin building--seems to have placated Mannerheim's supporters. on the other hand Holl's design itself, viewed by means of many as entirely too radical for its adjoining matter continued to provoke a stream of discontented make notess in the press. "No cultural occurrence or building project has at any time been the object of like sharp-tongued, broad-based and long-standing debate," observ the Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest daily.

however the completed building, with its curv cover of patinated zinc and its light-refracting exterior walls of hand-polished aluminum and sand-blasted glass, in fact strike one as beings remarkably comfortable in its triangular site. Kiasma's abstract shape is an imaginative combination of curvilinear and trapezoidal forms, its genealogy more Guggenheim than Getty Each of the four facades tenders a distinctive impression, a variant kind of asymmetry which is heightened by means of the architect's sparing use of reddish accents (panels of textur and treated brass) upon the building's north and southerly elevations.

The museum's interior, with its five-story-high lobby and its approximately 130000 square feet of floor space (of which 43000 square feet are available for display), is powerfully sculptural in effect. The space is defined and dominated through the sweeping curves and countercurve of Holl's white-plastered coagulate walls and his series of cantilevered ramps. In addition, there are numerous surprising vistas, unexpect light sources and a nonprescribed (sometimes puzzling) roll on of traffic. Though the manifold interior is visually exciting, individual suspects that the museum's 25 smallish galleries may in the drawn out run prove limiting as exhibition areas.

For the unobtrusive opening shows, however, space was not a point in dispute On the museum's fifth floor, in an exhibition titled "This Side of the Ocean" (organized by dint of chief curator Maaretta Jaukkuri), 11 Finnish artists addressed "the changing universal of Finnishness," primarily through installations, film and video. Among those included were Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Esko Mennikko, Pekka Nevalainen, Fanni Niemi-Junkola, Kimmo Sarje and Kimmo Kiskela. greatest in quantity of the remain ing exhibition space was devot to "Dialogues," a selection of about 40 works from the permanent collection (which now totals a certain quantity of 4,000 objects). Though the collection is heavily Nordic, this inaugural display favored non-Scandinavian artists such as Wolfgang Laib, Berlinde de Bruyckere Helen Chadwick, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, Ilya Kabakov, Cindy Sherman, Tony Oursler, Jeff Wall, Ange Leccia, Nan Goldin and Rosemarie Trockel In addition, "Studio K" an area which will be devot to small temporary exhibitions from "different visual tillages worldwide," presented Reckless, a floor installation by dint of Polly Apfelbaum.