Winning Guggenheim Helsinki design revealed

The French architecture firm Moreau Kusunoki Architects has won the competition to design the Guggenheim Helsinki, seeing off five other finalists from a total of 1715 original submissions. The firm’s design, which sets out a series of nine low pavilions around a squat lighthouse-like tower of charred timber, was praised by the jury as a place ‘where art and society could meet and inter-mingle’ and that was ‘deeply respectful of the site’.

The winning firm is only a few years old – it was set up by Hiroko Kusunoki and Nicolas Moreau in 2011 – and relatively unknown. They join the ranks of distinguished architects selected to design the Guggenheim’s various museums, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building in New York, and Frank Gehry’s career-defining design in Bilbao.

What do you make of their proposal?