Sara Hilden Art Museum

Our proposal for the Sara Hilden Art Museum creates a distinct local and global cultural destination, respecting Tampere’s unique heritage whilst providing a vibrant series of spaces, connecting with the city and nature, to engage with the future of art and design.

Client
Sara Hilden Foundation and
City of Tampere

Location
Tampere, Finland

Size
94,000 sqft

Sara Hilden Art Museum blends Tampere's historic quarter with new buildings and dynamic spaces that feature a public square, a new park entrance through a brick colonnade, and a striking timber and glass museum tower offering panoramic lake views.

The vibrant heart of the proposal is a new public square, framed on three sides by the art museum and on the fourth by the celebrated Neo-Gothic former factory headquarters.

Above the museum entrance, an iconic new tower is twisted to align with the geometry of Finlayson Palace, offering spectacular views over the surrounding protected trees to the Tammerkoski Rapids and Lake Näsijärvi beyond from a multifunctional lantern skyroom. The verticality of the tower compliments the surrounding chimneys of industrial Tampere. A layered façade of delicate timber fins and glass gives the tower a transformative quality from daylight to darkness, providing a new reference point in the cityscape all year round.

  • The Competition Site

  • Defining the site boundary, preserving significant trees and maintaining Finlaysoninkatu as a vehicular access route.

  • Splitting the proposal into three built volumes to respect the sight line between the Finlayson Palace and the former Factory Headquarters

  • Linking two of the built volumes with a single storey colonnade, which frames a new public square and becomes a new gateway to the park

  • Key components of the building are twisted to align with the Finlayson Palace such as the tower, and the edge of the public square

  • The proposal has a porous public realm, creating new pedestrian connections across the site

The exhibition and public service facilities are arranged to allow a flexible programme of events and create a distinct and memorable visitor journey through the art museum.

Arriving in the entrance foyer from the public square, visitors descend to the bottom of a triple height atrium for ticket sales and cloakroom. From here they can enter through to the large basement galleries or take the lift to the top of the tower, where a multifunctional lantern skyroom offers unprecedented views over the park, the palace and the landscape beyond. From here they can slowly descend through a series of single and double height gallery spaces via dramatic staircases which alternate along the eastern and western perimeter of the tower.

  • Lobby

  • Lantern Skyroom

  • Gallery

The tower is externally clad in timber fins. The primary vertical and horizontal fins provide a strong geometry which emphasise the twisted relationship with lower brick covered buildings. Secondary delicate fins provide shading to glazing alongside the vertical circulation, which wraps around the perimeter and allows the galleries to be clean internal volumes for the display of art. This layering of materials provides indirect natural light to the corners of the galleries during the day whilst giving the tower an ethereal glow at night.

The tower has a concrete structure allowing maximum efficiency of floor depths as well as flexibility of the type and weight of artwork displayed in the gallery space. The eastern and western walls of the tower, separating the galleries and the circulation stair could accommodate the primary services, allowing coffered concrete soffits to be expressed within the gallery spaces.

Green roofs to the top of the volumes following the city grids as well as planting to the Level 1 terraces and public square will assist water retention and the green factor across the site as well as supporting local wildlife.