When you visit the galleries of Guggenheim Helsinki, you may have to bring a life vest. This submission to the Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition floats the idea of a museum over water, traveling between the ports of St. Petersburg, Tallinn, and Helsinki. Proposed as a hypothetical submission to the worldwide contest, the team at OfficeUS delve into the notion of transience in the new world of architourism. The brief reads: "As a global freeport, the museum develops a completely new infrastructure, offering the strategic tax benefits of freeport art storage while enabling exhibitions of some of the most important pieces of modern art and design." Upcoming exhibits include (hypothetically) Olafur Elliasson, Yves Klein and Thomas Demand.
Touted as an art exhibition space and high-security storage hybrid, Guggenheim Cruises are targeted towards "Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Individuals," including special tax exemptions for storing art aboard the traveling museum. As OfficeUS notes, a cruising museum would offer high powered investors in art a range of advantages: "security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. This special treatment is possible because goods in freeports are technically in transit."
Cruises are expected to take thirteen hours from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, and St. Petersburg to Tallinn, and three hours between Tallinn and Helsinki. The proposal aims to dismantle the necessity of a fixed-location museum, questioning the validity of the well-documented Guggenheim Effect. With architects periodically dabbling in the nautical world the question remains: could Guggenheim launch a modern art museum into the Baltic Sea without sinking? Find out more about the proposal for Guggenheim Cruises here.
