Gösta's Pavilion – An Example of European Cooperation
The sensitive architecture of the timber-frame extension has won awards in Finland and abroad.
An international architectural competition on the design of the extension was held in 2010–2011 and it attracted 579 submissions from 42 countries. The competition was won by the Barcelona architectural firm MX_SI’s work Parallels, designed by architects Héctor Mendoza, Mara Partida and Boris Bezan. Further design was launched on the basis of the submission, and the construction work began in autumn 2012.
Gösta’s Pavilion descends in a gentle arc towards the lakeshore. It respects the manor and grows to his full dimensions towards the park. It is beautifully connected to the old manor by a glass corridor. The pavilion’s basic structure consists of more than 100 laminated-timber columns and beams, which support the building and give it its distinctive appearance. The alternation of wood and glass surfaces impart a rhythm to the building and connect it to the surrounding park.
Gösta’s Pavilion has a gross floor area of 5,700 square metres. It features 1,000 square metres of new exhibition space, a high-quality restaurant, a reception hall and a museum shop. The new building also offers staff office premises as well as modern storage facilities for the Gösta Serlachius Arts Foundation’s substantial art collection.
The total cost of the construction project was around EUR 20 million. It was built entirely with the Foundation’s own resources. The main contractor for the construction project was the company Jämsän Kone- and Rakennuspalvelu Oy. In the architectural design, the Finnish partner was the architectural firm Huttunen-Lipasti-Pakkanen.
Award-winning extension
The modern and sensitive architecture of Gösta’s Pavilion has been widely praised. It has also collected a number of awards and has been nominated in many competitions both in Finland and abroad. It won, for example, the Wood Building of the Year award in Finland in November 2014.
Gösta’s Pavilion was one of the four finalists in the Architecture Finlandia Prize. The pavilion gained international visibility as a candidate in the Mies van der Rohe 2015 competition. The European Union’s most important contemporary architecture competition attracted 420 entries from 36 European countries. In addition to Gösta’s Pavilion, three other projects from Finland were nominated.
At the end of year 2014, architectural firm MX_SI was nominated in the Young Architect category in the UK’s most prestigious Architect of the Year award. It was also a candidate in the architecture category of the Swedish Årets Rum/Room of the Year award.
In April 2015 MX_SI and its Slovenian architect Boris Bezan won Slovenia’s highest award for architecture. In December 2013, the pavilion and architectural firm were awarded the important Spanish International Architecture Prize.
Finland’s Project Management Association chose the pavilion as the winner of the Project of the Year competition in November 2014. The prize was awarded to the project’s quantity surveyor, Ramboll CM Oy.