'Veep' honored for making Baltimore's Engineers Club into Helsinki

Talk about the magic of television. HBO's "Veep" won an Art Directors Guild Award over the weekend for a most impressive act of TV transformation.

Led by production designer Jim Gloster, Baltimore's Engineers Club and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport were made to stand in for Helsinki, Finland, in a Season 2 episode titled "Helsinki."

The episode features Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) on a disastrous diplomatic trip to Finland. (Does she have any other kind of diplomatic trips?)

"We didn't shoot anything in Helsinki," said S. Scott Clackum, location manager for the series. "We had a little second unit shoot some snowy streets, but it was otherwise all done here."

Production designer Jim Gloster won the Art Directors Guild Award for the episode in part because he made the Engineers Club stand in for Helsinki so successfully, using multiple rooms in the mansion, according to Clackum.

The crew from "Veep" also dressed Baltimore's airport for TV success as a stand-in for Helsinki's terminal.

"We shot the international side of BWI for the Helsinki airport, which believe it or not, is a pretty close match architecturally," Clackum said.

Other Art Directors Guild Award winners for TV included: "Game of Thrones," "Behind the Candelabra," "Battlestar Galactica," "Portlandia" and "The 67th Annual Tony Awards."

The "18th Annual Art Directors Guild Awards" were presented Saturday night at the Beverly Hilton.