The Guggenheim wants in Helsinki – oh no!

The mood at the editorial office is distraught. Helsinki’s South Harbour, quite a fantastic piece of existing city, is at risk from the unholy alliance of creative city doctrine and international architecture.

See here for some good views on it from wonderful The Next Helsinki team.

Earlier today the winner of the prize for the notional Helsinki Guggenheim Art Museum was unveiled. There has been quite a lot of enthusiasm, even from unexpected quarters.

It’s unlikely that the jury ever concentrated on its task in the manner we Helsinkians deserve, given that there were 1 715 entries (some featured above, more on the G website).

And JHJ is not impressed by the architectural merits of the winning entry, Moreau Kusunoki’s dark tower called Art in the City (but Beacon/Majakka as well).

It looks glum and too tall and totally unsuitable for the waterfront.

Nobody here in the editorial offices here knows anyone who wants this thing – in pretty much any shape or form. (But especially not this Moominvalley wannabe glumness!)

There’s also no money for it. There’s no planning consent. The city already turned the idea down once. Officially. There’s little desire for it among ordinary people and not much among artists.

Those of us who desire the Guggenheim Foundation to eff off, frequently get told that were we more cosmopolitan we would want it.

At one point we all (at least here at JHJ) thought the horrible thing had been sent on its way. But no.

A very strong desire for it is coming from somewhere.

The politics is horrible but then the idea of the Guggenheim interfering [sic] in our art world as well as the cityscape, was always going to be controversial.

Proponents, including the country’s biggest daily newspaper, have spewed endless supportive propaganda for a Guggenheim. A little less outrageously, the G Foundation briefed Miltton Communications Group to do its propaganda locally (so-called public relations and marketing being the way business manipulates public opinion).

Given that the post-industrial economy we live in produces mostly data-fog and commercial entertainment, it’s not surprising that information about the museum is abundant but rather untrustworthy.

For Finnish-speakers, however, I do recommend listening to this YLE radio interview with architect and critic Tarja Nurmi. She covers many, many of the shortcomings of the project in a short space of time. Starts at around 9 mins into the programme.

It’s all so upsetting we can’t possibly pursue this any more.

The usual formula for Helsinki’s South Harbour

We are decamped to where birdsong dominates. Here the Baltic Sea still looks lovely even as the battle against using it as a dump falters.

Meanwhile, like every Midsummer, Helsinki has apparently been given over to the tourists and the seagulls.

Looking at the results of the City Planning Department’s South Harbour Ideas Competition, it’s clear that the summer and the tourist (not least the Baltic Sea cruise passengers) are very much to the fore in the city managers’ thoughts.

For me the images highlight the gulf between my dreams and the dreams (?) of those who manage the city. Once again they have followed the usual and deadening formula: rhetoric of vitality + Computer Aided Design = winning entry.

I love the South Harbour, iconic view and image, and still as real as the pain in my toe. What, I wonder, do the tourists make of the market square and its surroundings?

If they are arriving cruise passengers, what do they perceive? An interesting city scape? Or other cruise ships six times the size of the largest edifices anchored on dry land?

JHJ had the pleasure of arriving by ship just last week. Beautiful. Interesting. People doing stuff.

The Harbour, at least from a distance, looked like a hive of real activity.

It made me think of a recent essay by that unbelievably prolific anthropologist David Graeber, called ‘Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit’. What, the essay ponders, are we all so busy with?

In Helsinki it wasn’t so long ago that office workers, university people and perhaps some local housewives (and at least one -husband I know of) frequented the market, the market-hall and the area around, for shopping, meeting, taking boats to islands and passing through on their way to somewhere else. And a good few people used to work here.

Some still do.

Not that there is that much work for dockworkers. Plenty of work for cleaners though. A startling proportion of those we saw appear to be darker skinned than most Finns.

Back to Graeber. I understood him to be saying that capitalism + computing has managed to reduce us all to administrators of our own and others’ lives. Creative doing is as hard as creativity-talk is necessary. All creatives do is try to sell.

The Planning Department and the City are selling Helsinki. As JHJ noted in an earlier post, this involves lots of image-making. And endless power-points accompanied by linguistic novelties like the “future dogmatic” or “future positive”, supposed to make us gaze misty-eyed into the lovely future and forget about the mess we continue to produce (my thoughts returning once more to the poor old Baltic).

The South Harbour Jury Report (available on this page), though not quite completely information-free, is pretty much in this vein of vacuous rhetoric. (But was the only thing they were looking for a way to get a decent cycling facility to get through the bottleneck of the market?)

P.S. Only one of the 4 winning entries, Meren Syleily, mentions work that’s not related to entertainment. Shame the prose is so complicated.

Keeping working
Just as importantly none of the proposals run counter to the essential requirements of the shipping terminals, ensuring that the activities of the port can continue unaffected, unconstrained by the imposition either of new obligations or overlapping functions.