French architecture firm Moreau Kusunoki have been named winners of the Guggenheim Helsinki competition, with the €126m (£100m, US$160.5m) project to be formed of Japanese-style pavilions and a striking lighthouse-style tower on the Helsinki waterfront.

The winning design by Moreau Kusunoki – a husband and wife team who only established their architecture firm in 2011 – titled Lighthouse, was chosen from a shortlist of 1,715 anonymous architects, the largest architectural competition in history and the first to be organised by the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation.

Moreau’s winning design features a series of charred timber and glass angular pavilions with flared roofs, punctuated by a lighthouse-style tower overlooking Helsinki’s South Harbor. The pavilions are connected by an interior street and served by a harbour promenade, while the tower is connected to the nearby Observatory Park via a pedestrian footbridge.

Judging panel member, Mark Wigley, architecture professor and dean emeritus at Columbia University, said: "The building will cohere around a covered street landscape that expands and contracts according to its interaction with the pavilions. It will be animated by different activities.

“The jury found the design deeply respectful of the site and setting", said Wigley, "It would create a fragmented, non-hierarchical, horizontal campus of linked pavilions where art and society could meet and intermingle. The connections between the pavilions have been well considered, to permit a continuous gallery experience if required.

“The designers of this new museum have had to react to the conversations which were taking place about it during the design stages,” he continued. “Everyone was discussing the museum but they didn't know what they were talking about because the design wasn’t finalised. Now they can continue their amazing discussions with an actual design as the basis of that conversation.

“The reason this project has been loved, is the fact the designers have been able to respond to the debate. It's not a building that is fixed or frozen, but a building waiting for the next level of conversation.”

Moreau’s record-breaking victory comes in what is officially the most popular architectural contest in history, with the Guggenheim contest attracting more entries than the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which was won by Heneghan Peng from 1,557 submissions.

Next steps for the museum are to gain approval for the project, after a 2012 vote narrowly rejected the development due to financial concerns. The €30m (US$33.6m, £21.4m) necessary to buy the rights to the Guggenheim name has been waived by the institution though money must still be raised to create a foundation to fund the running of the museum.

So far around €10m (US$11.2m, £7.1m) has been secured from 20 private donors, according to museum officials. A rival ‘Anti-Guggenheim’ contest is still in the pipeline, with more than 200 entries seeking to find ways for the South Harbor area to be “transformed for the maximum benefit” of residents and visitors without a Guggenheim.

Helsinki’s mayor, Jussi Pajunen, has supported the plans “as an engine of economic development”, with an independent report conducted on behalf of the Guggenheim estimating that the new museum will generate €50m, (US$56m, £35.5m) a year, creating nearly 500 jobs in the area, as well as 800 construction jobs.