Peter MacKeith

“Has ‘The Lighthouse’ Found Support?” boldly queried the Helsinki daily newspaper’s leading headline the morning after the June 23 announcement of the winning entry of the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long, two-phase, open international design competition to produce “a museum for the 21st century” as an extension of its branded franchise operations in the Finnish capital. The competition and its long-awaited result have been aimed at persuasively reinvigorating the Guggenheim’s dogged five-year saga in “the White City of the North,” following the Helsinki City Council’s 2011 rejection of the proposed museum branch and its financing. The headline’s question neatly condensed several aspects

Helsinki Library ALA Architects On June 14, a unanimous jury named ALA Architects the winner of the city of Helsinki’s open, international competition for the design of the new Helsinki Central Library. The announcement was made at a well-attended ceremony at the Helsinki Music Center, adjacent to the library building site in the Helsinki Töölö Bay cultural district. With the award of first prize and 50,000 Euros to ALA Architects, the jury also recommended that the building commission proceed with the Finnish partnership, known for the dramatic forms of their recently opened Kilden Performing Arts Center in Kristiansand, Norway. ("Käännös,"

Photo © Agnete Schlichtkrull Henning Larsen Renowned Danish architect Henning Larsen, long recognized as a master of light, died at his home in Copenhagen on June 22, 2013, at the age of 87. Poignantly, his death occurred on the summer solstice, a day of celebration of natural light in the Nordic countries. The partners of Henning Larsen Architects made the announcement via the firm’s website, with the declaration that “the funeral will take place in silence.” Photo © Rigmor Mydtskov Henning Larsen The silence left by the absence of the architect resounds, however, with the built, educational, and cultural accomplishments of

Sn'hetta Snøhetta slices through the landscape with the sharp-edged Petter Dass Museum. Until his death in 1707, the parson poet Petter Dass wrote prolifically from the medieval church of the small shoreline farming community of Alstahaug—hard by the western slopes of Norway’s dramatic Seven Sisters mountain range. Celebrating the sacred virtues of what inhabitants refer to as “the kingdom of the thousand isles,” Dass paid reverent homage to the people and landscape of northern Norway in his most famous work, Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland): It seems that, far out on the edge of the earth Old nature has

Until his death in 1707, the parson poet Petter Dass wrote prolifically from the medieval church of the small shoreline farming community of Alstahaug—hard by the western slopes of Norway’s dramatic Seven Sisters mountain range.