Sebastian Thor McAnulty

Fast and Slow is a proposal for the Helsinki Art and Architecture Museum. This site was recently considered for a new installation of a Guggenheim Museum. This previous competition received over 1000 entries from all over the world seeking to create a new global icon. While surely, most of these submissions were better than the site’s current function as parking lot, these proposals were ultimately rejected by the people of Helsinki.

My thesis explores the different modes, environments, forms that might organize a diverse range of exhibitions. Instead of organizing the museum according to organizing principles that cohere around a larger, more singular form of the museum, I propose we think of space and organization in terms of fast and slow space.

Initial research looked carefully at the Shakespearian Theatre in Gdańsk, Poland. In this project the theater volume is placed within a sheltered courtyard surrounded by a continuous perimeter of circulation. The model of theatre to linear circulation became a starting point to consider ideas of fast and slow space.

All museums can, at some level, be thought of as archival storage containers. The role of curation is to organize its contents to fulfill a curatorial, usually in the guise of education. More often than not, the contents of an exhibition are organized chronologically or thematically; the comparison of works leads to a larger understanding of its cultural meaning.  In our conception of the museum, we retain the vital role of historical artifacts, displayed as one thing after another, to communicate the diversity and trajectory of cultural histories. In this slow space, the organization, like the collection, is composed of an enfilade of galleries, arrayed in a perimeter line that allows one to view into the work and out to the surrounding city, both acting as archives of culture.

A large, more vertical volume occupies the central courtyard space of the museum. A sectional object where each floor is different is, like a mediatheque, for the exhibition of constantly changing work, none of it in the permanent collection. This is characterized as fast space, a place where change is the only constant and a variety of experiences can be had in the different floor-volumes that make up the whole.

As one moves along the line of the enfilade, the fast space of the central volume allows for short cuts; from one side of the museum to the other, to change floor levels, to move from inside to outside (courtyard and roof garden).

As one moves along the line of the enfilade, the fast space of the central volume allows for short cuts; from one side of the museum to the other, to change floor levels, to move from inside to outside (courtyard and roof garden).