Kiasma - An Architectural "Crossing"
At the moment, there is no other country in the western world with an economic growth rate greater than Finland's, and equally impressive is the country's current development of cultural facilities. Two years ago, Helsinki opened a new opera house and a museum of modern art, and a recently completed architectural competition has decided the design of a future concert hall. A common feature in all three of these schemes is their localization east of the main street - Mannerheimintie - with Aalto's Finlandia hall setting the local standard. However, this has not prevented the American architect Steven Holl (b.1947) from creating an outstanding museum for modern art determined not only on by surroundings but also its own terms, in an until now unseen mixture of building forms and scale considerations.
Steven Holl christened his winning competition proposal (1992) "KIASMA,” which means the crossing of two lines as in an "X.” His completed museum literally lives up to this name through its consistent ambiguity both in the building's mixture of soft and angular forms as well as its light and heavy materials. But most of all, the architect's own uncertainty as to what a suitable framework for modern art consists of - as well as the museum's exposed location on one of Helsinki's most important street crossings - fostered this unusual architectural hybrid.
With its outer form, the KIASMA building could remind one of a black slug dragging itself toward north with its head raised high and the lower tip of its tail located between the equestrian statue of marshal Mannerheim and Helsinki's hefty post office. In any case, that is the way the models looked from Holl’s competition proposal, and thus they offered associations to Diller and Scofidio’s "Slow House"(1989) - a vacation house on Long Island formed as a stylized snail. In its final form, the culture center has been given “a tail,” which however has been cut off and made part of the main entrance. This was resolved by placing a boxlike building alongside the snail tail, so that the “box” slightly further toward north invariably plows into the snail’s concave side as collision architecture.
The ambiguity between the curved and the right-angled form idioms has never appeared before as a theme in Holl’s work and must thus primarily be attributed to the site, where KIASMA is wedged in between a main traffic artery, the neighboring and predominant post office building, and a landscaped open space toward north. Toward northwest on the opposite side of Mannerheimintie street, the Finnish parliament building towers over its tall arrival stairway, while KIASMA's modest 12,000 square meters in four stories can only relate to the functionalistic Laisipalasti (Glass palace, 1936) on the corner toward southwest. With its delicate and exposed location, KIASMA’s architectural challenge can best be likened to a sculpture that lies free in three directions (while the fourth is fixed and dominated) and where the neighboring buildings’ varied scale ruled out a more traditional form.
On the ground floor, there is a book shop and a café, west of the entrance toward south. Toward east, there is a spacious cloakroom and the restrooms. The first impression the visitor receives on entering the museum, is a tall, wedged-shaped lobby space dominated by a skylight. At the farthest end of this arrival area one can glimpse a spiral stairway behind a large ramp, which curves up to the exhibition spaces on the first floor, while a footbridge crashes into the wall of the ramp, one story higher. Compared to the museum’s well-designed, light facades, the cast in place concrete walls and ramps in the interior seem to be a surprisingly heavy choice. One has hardly begun to ascend the ramp before the psychological feeling of tired legs begins. The guest has a feeling of being sucked down toward the black concrete floor. Concrete by nature is a heavy material, but in an otherwise white-painted space, the fact that it can weigh one down must be attributed to the combination of the ramp slope and the protest one’s feet make about moving on such a hard surface. In any case, it is an extremely tangible example of a physical reaction to intellectual intentions.
The exhibition spaces are determined by the architect’s research and thus approach 9 x 9 x 4.5 meters and offer extreme variations in daylighting. Toward southwest, they primarily face translucent glass panels, while toward northeast, there are unusual skylights with zinc-covered sides. Locating skylights on the third and fourth mansard stories in a four-five story building was possible due to the building’s convex north facade - prompted by the architect’s desire to provide as much daylighting as possible in all the exhibition spaces, even when the sun in the Finnish winter can be as low as 51 degrees over the horizon.
The constellations of materials, colors and types of glass at KIASMA are a chapter in themselves: The central, cast-in-place concrete walls, evade the exterior steel structure while in the climate screen are sided with zinc, aluminum, copper or nonferrous glass.
The great display of materials corresponds to the museum’s general degree of complexity, but in order to avoid galvanic reactions, the five-millimeter thick aluminum panels had to be produced in a salt-resistant alloy (Al Mg4.5 Mn), and then hand-scoured with sand - to remove any resemblance to new-struck silver. The copper appears primarily around the tall north wall, and as an interior lining of the exhibition room door openings, which means that the rough stucco walls are terminated by a strong, precise edge. Finally, the curved roof with skylights toward northeast is covered with pre-oxidized rolled zinc.
A comprehensive evaluation of KIASMA as a building reveals an unusual conglomeration of form and material idioms, which despite it all manages to hang together in a convincing architectural whole both as a solitary building mass and in the building’s relation to the surrounding city’s varied context. Through its own complexity and self-contradiction, the museum has become a varied framework around the experience of contemporary art - without the architecture stealing the stage from the art work. In an odd way, KIASMA is more postmodernistic than the neomodernistic architecture that closed the 1990's. Thus, it gives rise to reflections as to how much minimalism in itself is a sufficient tool to tackle the more complex urban challenges. KIASMA implies that perhaps we must find other ways of doing this.
Flemming Skude
FACTS:
Building costs for KIASMA: 240 million FinMark or 300 million Dkr. (1998) for 12.000 square meters
Photographs: Flemming Skude.
