Finns reject Guggenheim gallery plan



Helsinki has rejected a proposal to build a €140m (£114m) Guggenheim museum on the Finnish capital's waterfront, a notice on the city's website said .
The Helsinki city board, a vetting committee of 15 municipal politicians selected to consider proposals for the Helsinki city council, voted eight to seven against putting the Guggenheim project forward for the council's consideration.

"The city board rejects the project," it said on the municipal website on Wednesday under the heading "Decision bulletin no 17".

Finnish media said the project was voted down over worries about governance and that it would be too costly. The decision comes amid government budget cuts to contend with a debt crisis.
The Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, which oversees the original, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum in New York as well as four overseas sites, proposed in January that it and the Finnish capital jointly develop a new contemporary art museum.

The Guggenheim said it chose Helsinki due to strong local interest and tradition in art and design, as well as the city's plans to develop its harbour properties.
Ari Wiseman, the Guggenheim's deputy director, told Reuters: "We were quite interested and excited by what we saw here – a population that is highly educated, which is very important for the success of the museum and for potential audience development."

The Guggenheim – which also has museums in Bilbao, Venice and Berlin and is building one in Abu Dhabi – noted that Helsinki lacked a significant modern art collection, a gap that it said the museum could fill and help draw tourists. It proposed a museum be built on a city-owned site in Helsinki's south harbour, and recommended the city move forward with an architectural competition.
The museum could have opened in 2018 after about three years of development, it said, adding that its €140m estimate included the construction and design of the building. The museum would also have needed public, private and corporate funding to cover operating costs.
The Finnish culture minister, Paavo Arhinmäki, took a sceptical view towards the project's funding. He assumed Finnish taxpayers would end up paying close to €100m of the construction costs.

"It is also worth considering whether Finnish taxpayers should finance a rich, multinational foundation in the first place," he wrote on his blog after the initial proposal.