Here Are the Top 6 Designs for the Guggenheim Helsinki, and They're All a Bad Idea

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has whittled down the 1,715 design entries it received in its unprecedented Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition to a finalist lix of six entries. Bummer for the 1,709 architects who didn't make the cut.

It's a bummer, in fact, for just about everyone involved. If the jurors for the competition deliberated for a hasty 5 minutes on every entry, then all told, they spent about 142 hours together—or 18 working days, according to the Spanish architecture collective Taller de Casqueria, which did the back-of-the-envelope math. That's to say nothing of the architectural teams who poured approximately $12,000 of work into each submission, for a total of $23 million in design labor (which the Guggenheim got for free).