The fourth time was the charm for a young Vesa Honkonen. Only eight percent of applicants are accepted into Finland’s three university-level architecture schools, Honkonen says, but “I decided I would try for as long as it took, I felt it was my way.” After three rejection notices, the aspiring designer matriculated at the University of Oulu.
Success came swiftly thereafter. Honkonen won the first school-wide competition of his Oulu tenure, exhibited a concept at the Venice Biennale in 1985, and three years after graduation, during a 1993 trip to New York, he was hired by Steven Holl as project architect overseeing Holl’s forthcoming Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. After the building’s completion in 1998, Honkonen founded his eponymous office back in Helsinki, which today operates from a converted hair salon.
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