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VENUE 087


HELSINKI MUSIC CENTRE


ALMOST 20 YEARS AFTER THE IDEA TO CREATE HELSINKI MUSIC CENTRE WAS CONCEIVED, IT HAS BEEN COMPLETED WITH PARTICULAR GRACE AND STYLE. IT HAS BEEN A VERY FINNISH AFFAIR. MICHAEL NICHOLSON REPORTS ON AN ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY ALLIANCE’S ACHIEVEMENT.


helsinki, finland EUROPE/MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA


In the same year that the South African public voted against apartheid and Disneyland Paris opened, the idea of building a new, collective home for Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Sibelius Academy conservatory was born. That was 1992, and the germinating stages of Helsinki Music Centre would take almost two decades and a reported 189 million euro to flourish into the venue that it is today. But flourish it has, and on Wednesday 31 August Finland’s new ‘nationwide home for the music community’ opened its doors to the public. Timeframes of that length are typically an indication of a project’s importance; as budgets rise, physical footprints do too, as well as the number of stakeholders. The more decisions there are to make, and the more stakeholders there are to satisfy, the greater the length of time that is required to reach agreed outcomes. It is a very necessary, or at least unavoidable, bureaucracy. When you consider the competition laws applicable to different facets of a publicly funded project in Finland, and how they are managed, you begin to understand why those timeframes exist. Helsinki Music Centre was designed by LPR-arkkitehdit. ISS Proko acted as construction consultants and project managers, working with main contractor, SRV. Acoustic design came from Nagata Acoustics and the entertainment technology requirements were specified by Akukon. The property is managed by government owned enterprise, Senate Properties. Antti Rehtijarvi, who owns his own company called Kudos, worked


as a consultant to ISS Proko, managing the entertainment technology element of the project. He revealed the complexities of handling the assignment of contracts: “Finland is small country with a population of 5.3 million, and despite the fact that we have many professional companies in the field of entertainment technology, it was clear from the beginning that there is no single company that could provide the equipment and installation for this scale of project. Finland is also quite an expensive country, and difficult to enter for foreign companies, so we didn’t expect to receive any offers from the international companies. Forced to keep things local, we had to divide the cake, and the entertainment technology of Helsinki Music Centre was split between 29 different contracts. “The entertainment technology for Helsinki Music Centre is built with public funding and this means that everything needs to go through a public procurement tender process. For many, even hearing the words ‘public procurement’ result in instant headache, and I have to admit that it can be a tricky business to get the exact quality products that the users want, and at the same time do everything by the book. Nowadays it seems to be more and more common for contractors to take these procurements to market court without any good reasons. There is almost a one year queue in Finnish market court, and there are several cases from the entertainment technology field. “Split tactics worked and 29 contracts were divided with 12 companies. Either it was the tactics or that the Finnish


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