Helsinki is an international city built on an intimate scale. Through harsh winters and heavy monsoons, Helsinki has become a city of interiors. Its society blooms indoors. This proposal for HelsinkiCall: The Design House competition, designed by Lyric Barnik, embraces this quality. It provides opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange. It borrows elements from the vernacular of the countryside, the ubiquity of the sauna and the evolution of Helsinki as a city.
Form
The form is basic: a podium and a residential block connected by a courtyard. The courtyard is essential to the residential typology of Helsinki. This building transforms the traditional courtyard into a central circulation.
One corridor connects all units in the residential mass, forging interaction and community among resident artists. The walkway connects the ground to the roof garden. Residents can pass through panoramas of the workshops, laboratories, homes, workspaces, and the city itself. The courtyard evolves into a community living room, where its ambiguous boundaries between public and private are celebrated. Artists and their ideas can organically collide, forming an artistic, cultural and experiential exchange.
Transparency
The podium, which houses the commercial programs (galleries, workshops and laboratories), encircles the glass courtyard. With this visual permeability, the passerby can engage spontaneously in the artistic workings of their neighbors. In the contemporary Finnish identity, this experimental culture of design is essential.
Greenery
The podium’s sculpted form, extrapolated from its surrounding topography, provides access from all elevations of the site. The roof is an accessible greenspace for the public. Its slope and greenery resemble the sod roofs used in rural Scandinavian vernacular.
Individual Units
The homes, built with prefabricated timber components, are modular units that connect to the ramped corridor. Communal workspaces, informal galleries and lookouts are distributed throughout the residential building, enriching the public realm in an ever-changing diversity of atmospheres.
Material & Structure
Wood is an ideal building material. It is local, renewable, abundant, and beautiful. The building uses Finnish post-and-beam joinery techniques combined with modern cross-laminated timber diagrids and prefabrication. As Finnish woodworking techniques in traditional craftsmanship disappear, the building aims to embody and preserve this innovation and craft.
Helsinki is a walkable city, and the building extends that mentality into its core function. The building borrows from the logic of the sauna, a public space of comfort and subdued atmosphere, of interior intimacy against harsh nature. It calls back to the serenity and landscape of the countryside with its greenery. Finally, through panoramic circulations and public spaces, it offers respite to its users. In Helsinki, the city of interiors, this proposal addresses the speed of an international city whilst preserving its charming intimacy.
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