A clay-based black paint forms a protective layer across the facade of this woodland cabin in Finland, designed by Playa Architects as the second home for a Finnish family living abroad (+ slideshow).
Finnish architect Tuukka Vuori of Playa Architects designed the house for friends who want to spend their holidays in their home country.
Named Villa Kettukallio, the 122-square-metre house is located on the edge of a lake in Hirvensalmi, on a spot where the family used to take forest walks. It will be visited throughout the year, so needed to be accommodating in all seasons.
“Winters can be very cold, sometimes minus 30, then in summer there’s daylight around the clock, so it had to work in both of these circumstances,” Vuori told Dezeen.
“The main brief was to take in these surroundings, so we added big glazed openings facing towards the lakeside,” he added.
Birch clads the exterior and has been coated with a black distemper paint that is typical of Scandinavian dwellings. This will help to protect the building from ageing.
Living and dining rooms take up around half of the house’s floorspace, encouraging the family to spend more time in communal areas rather than in the bedrooms.
A sauna sits on the north side of the site on the opposite side of a veranda, creating a protected seating area where residents can cool down. An entrance then leads directly back into the house via the shower room.
“Traditionally lakeside homes have separate saunas, but the family didn’t want it to be separate,” said Vuori. “This meant we could avoid building extra shower spaces, which also deals with some environmental concerns.”
A second terrace on the south side of the building gives the family a sunny space for dining outdoors.
Walls and ceilings inside the house are lined with birch and alder. The floors are pine and feature stripes created by the family’s own sawmill.
“With pine you usually get this really strong texture in the wood, these horizontal sections,” explained Vuori.
Heating is provided by a wood-burning stove that sits between the kitchen and the living room. Constructed from brick, this is coated with grey plaster to give it the appearance of polished concrete.
Photography is by Tuomas Uusheimo.
Here’s more information from Playa Architects:
Villa Kettukallio
The villa is the all-year-round base in Finland for a four-person family currently living abroad. The site between cliffs and a fairly steep lakeside beach was chosen during the family’s forest walks. The place overlooks a narrow strait and far out to an open expanse of the lake. In accordance with the site conditions, the building is relatively closed off towards the forest while opening up generously in the direction of the lake.
Site plan
The house is split by an atrium yard and a covered terrace, on one side of which are small bedrooms and the other more generous living spaces. During the summer the floor layout allows for “complete circulation”. Instead of a separate shoreline sauna building, a sauna was built in connection with the house itself. A covered veranda for cooling off after the sauna separates the sauna from the rest of the building.
Floor plan
In painting the facade with black distemper paint, the building blends with the shadows of the pine forest when viewed from the direction of the lake.
Section one
In the interior, the surfaces are mostly untreated domestic wood: birch, pine and common alder. The wood floors are built from vertical-grain pine boards from the family-owned sawmill.
This wooden home in Helsinki by Finnish architect Tuomas Siitonen has a roof that dips in the middle to allow views across it and a kinked plan that wraps around a secluded garden (+ slideshow).
Constructed on a sloping plot in the garden of a house occupied by the client’s parents, the building was designed by Siitonen to provide two separate apartments – one for a couple and their two children, and another for the children’s great-grandmother.
The ground floor contains an accessible apartment for the great-grandmother, while a larger apartment for the family occupies the two upper storeys.
“The brief was to design an inspiring and environmentally sensible house incorporating a separate flat for a grandmother, or for example to be used by one of the children in the future,” Siitonen told Dezeen.
The new house’s plan kinks to accommodate the contours of the site and to wrap around the garden it shares with the existing hundred-year-old property, increasing privacy while maintaining a connection with its neighbour.
On the other side, the building presents a closed facade to a nearby road and railway, while its height allows views from the upper floors and balcony.
“The plot was a north-facing slope, so I wanted to build something that rises up to provide light and views,” said Siitonen.
“The slope faces a busy road and a railway, which is why the house is more closed on that side and opens up towards the garden, making a small sheltering turn that follows the slope to make the terrace feel more intimate and to take the garden into the house.”
Siberian larch cladding covers the building’s exterior. It will turn grey over time and Siitonen said it was chosen to reflect the house’s natural setting.
As well as the accessible self-contained apartment, the ground floor contains utility areas and a sauna.
Upstairs is an open plan living and dining area incorporating a custom-made kitchen built from flamed birch.
Large windows look out onto a large wood-lined terrace perched among the treetops that can be heated by a fireplace that backs onto another one inside the living room.
Another staircase leads past windows that look out over the treetops to a mezzanine that is intended to give the space the feel of a treehouse, and on to the master bedroom housed in the loft.
Sustainability measures were a key part of the clients’ brief and informed the use of wood throughout the project and the use of a ground-sourced heat pump and underfloor heating that removes a need for radiators.
Here’s a text about the project by Martta Louekari:
House M-M, Helsinki, Finland
Someone should pick the children up from day-care; the grandparents would appreciate a visit; who’d have time to cook and help with the homework? What if the whole family lived together, on the same plot, even under the same roof?
Actors Vilma Melasniemi and Juho Milonoff wanted a home where the entire family, including grand- parents and great-grandmother could spend their time together. They were looking for space for the family and friends to be together, but also for the chance for everyone to have some privacy and their own room. That way the grandparents could help with childcare and great-grandmother would have company and a feeling of security.
A place was found on the plot of mother Vilma’s parents’ home in Helsinki’s Oulunkylä. The location of the 100-year-old house – in a garden of apple and lilac trees with a steep north-facing slope – imposed its own demands on the design. What was wanted was a house that would be contemporary and yet homely and full of character, that would respect its surroundings and the site’s natural features but would still constitute a clearly self-contained whole.
The new home was designed with two apartments. The lower storey is a level-access studio-apartment for Vilma Melasniemi’s 91-year-old grandmother. The ground floor also includes sauna and utility spaces.
The 120 square-metre apartment upstairs is the home of Vilma Melasniemi and Juho Milonoff and their 8 and 11-year-old children. The upstairs is comprised of a large reception room and a kitchen, made to measure in flamed birch, that serve as the whole family’s living space. In the summer this extends effortlessly outdoors via a large terrace.
The three-storey building sits comfortably on the slope, the large windows bringing in the green outside and creating a feel of a tree house. The tree house-like atmosphere is enhanced by the loft space situated over the kitchen and the stairs leading to the master bedroom with its view over the tree tops. The exterior of Siberian larch changes with the seasons and will gradually turn grey.
Mother Vilma Melasniemi’s parents continue to live in their wooden villa on the same plot. Because the roof of the new building dips in the middle, it does not affect the familiar view from the villa to the rising slope across the plot. The footprint of the new-build follows the shape of the slope and creates a bend making the garden more intimate and shielding it from the public roadway.
One important consideration was the building’s ecological sustainability. Most of the building is made of wood. The building has floor heating coupled to ground-source heat so stand-alone radiators are not necessary. The energy needed for cooling in the summer also comes from ground-source heat. Because of its large south facing roof space, in the future it will also be possible to make good use of solar energy.
“The large windows bring light and warmth right into the house. The exterior doesn’t need maintenance and the open fireplace heats up with wood from our own plot. We travel to work and into town by train. We believe these are sustainable solutions. One good home in a lifetime is enough!” says Vilma Melasniemi.
Finland’s baby-boomer generations are ageing; a demographic peak of 65 to 74-year-olds is expected in 2020, and there is already a shortage of care-home places and staff. The working day is long and school-age children are often forced to spend afternoons either at after-school clubs or home alone. Well-designed models for multi-generational living and functional architecture can help meet these challenges in the future.
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Opinion: in his first Opinion column for Dezeen, Dan Hill reflects on the recent sale of Finland’s two most iconic design brands – Artek and Nokia – and suggests what the country’s design industry should do next.
“John le Carré said the only way to write about a place was after visiting it for a day, or after a long life once you’d moved there… Time between those two lengths didn’t lend more certainty, just detail,” wrote Rosecrans Baldwin in Paris I Love You But You’re Getting Me Down.
Within a single week, not long after football’s transfer deadline day, Nokia’s “devices and services” division, which contributed hugely to Finland’s economic and cultural growth over the last two decades, moved to Microsoft for a Gareth Bale-esque $7.71 billion. This deal was swiftly followed by Artek, formerly owned by the Swedish investment company Proventus, joining furniture’s Champions League, via Vitra.
Although this small country of five million people has also produced Iitala, Marimekko, Kone, Fiskars and others, these two firms bookend a first era of Finnish design, with Artek founded by the Aaltos and co. in 1935 and Nokia’s dominance of the global mobile phone sector six decades later. Where do these “exits” leave Finnish design?
Under Marko Ahtisaari, a coherent and bold design culture had recently emerged at Nokia, with their Lumia phones drawing on a distinctly European heritage to produce an object, at least, that moved beyond Apple and Samsung. However, the wider culture around Nokia over the last decade had already – and fatally – betrayed a lack of understanding of the value of design. The software suffered badly and although intriguing handsets occasionally emerged, one felt that design was generally no more than an indulged child amidst what was really a masterful engineering and logistics machine, wrapped in the PowerPoint Palace’s bureaucratic managerialism.
Once Apple, and then Google, had deployed a richer, strategic approach to design in order to seamlessly orchestrate people, apps, media, devices and the interfaces between them, Nokia had no answer. Neither did Microsoft, for that matter. Hence these massive brands were left looking like the two kids picked last in the school playground, staring awkwardly at their boots, red-faced and uncomfortable in last year’s kit. With no other option than each other, Microsoft bought Nokia’s design function – minus Ahtisaari, who is moving on – simply to stay in the game.
Meanwhile, Artek had been looking forward, with Ville Kokkonen’s seasonal affective disorder-defying lamps building on imaginative research. As with Nokia and Ahtisaari, Artek benefits from thoughtful designer leadership in Kokkonen; both draw from wide-ranging perspectives well outside of traditional design practice. Yet Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.
So the questions posed by these acquisitions are more fundamental than those of the balance sheet, where both moves make sense commercially. The question is cultural: Artek was born with an avant-garde mission, whilst Nokia was the first to capitalise upon the most influential cultural object of the last three decades. So this week of deals actually poses the question: what does Finnish product design do now?
There are two obvious trajectories to ascribe, twin arcs towards a twenty-first century industrial design.
The first is in a new form of interactive object, as active partners of people, socially and culturally, via Internet of Things technologies, absorbing the essence of Varnelis’s “new modernity”. Here objects can be augmented with emotional expressiveness and responsiveness, with variable character and identity, via interactions across diverse social relations and contexts. In other words, what’s Finnish for Little Printer or Fuelband? Nest or Glass? Or better, whatever’s next?
Might this be a big ask for a culture whose national stereotype is the taciturn man likely to embark on a devastatingly lengthy Finnish silence at any moment? Like all stereotypes, this is both true and not true, and fortunately there are enough (North) polar opposites to refute it. Yet their late urbanisation means Finns rarely possesses a naturally social culture. It is a culture rooted in the tangible, the material, the output of designer Tapio Wirkkala‘s and Kaj Franck‘s peerless craft. After all, Nokia lost it when Apple veered towards people over things.
The Finnish language is at its most beautiful in the ancient series of soft, weathered words denoting the physical reality of landscapes and bodies; “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence”, as novelist Diego Marani has it. Yet there is effectively no word for “please”.
But despite this granite-hard pragmatism, there is evidence elsewhere of a supreme facility with the social (and no, Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, I’m not looking at you.)
There is the gloriously levelling ritual of cheek-to-cheek encounters in the sauna, a unique social space recently revived by NOW in Helsinki. Equally, the päiväkoti day-care system for pre-school children is one of the finest learning environments you can imagine, setting up the nation’s world-class results. It is human-centred, with an emphasis on both material and environmental exploration – most time is spent outdoors – as well as carefully tended social, cultural and emotional growth.
Then we must note the Nordic region’s unlikely but deserved emergence as a culinary leader, well-represented in Helsinki. This provides more evidence, with its emphasis on the nuanced, often intangible differentiators of quality, service, provenance, ritual and theatre.
Could Finnish design culture augment its innate facility with the inert via this empathetic understanding of people, ritual and service?
If that is a move outwards from the object, there is another trajectory in the opposite direction, towards a different kind of performative fabric, via architecture at the atomic scale.
The 50,000 Nokia employees not bought by Microsoft – still under the Nokia brand, focused on networks, mapping and advanced technologies – recently received a €1 billion EU grant for research into graphene, the “indistinguishable-from-magic” one-atom-thick material that is the thinnest and lightest yet produced, 300 times stronger than steel, transparent, bendable and highly conductive.
Similarly, Finland has Aalto University’s world-renowned Nanotalo lab, with its focus on biomimetic nanocomposites, particularly derived from Finnish timber. Artek’s Kokkonen is a regular visitor. Yet its facility is separated from the design faculties, lost in the university’s misguided attempt at an urban plan without the urban. Connect the power of this research to Finland’s design culture and its potential becomes tangible, just as with 1930s modernism that fused science and engineering with design in order to produce Artek.
Finland could take its design culture forward once again, now all that is solid – stone, fabric, ceramic, glass – has melted into an air of vertically-integrated software, services and media. Perhaps the next evolution is in digital/physical hybrid objects possessing familiar and treasured materials woven with two-dimensional nanocomposites, and allied with responsiveness, awareness, and character by virtue of having the internet embedded within. Finland might be perfectly placed to pick up that gauntlet. But will they?
Despite a culture borne of survival, Finland has an incredibly high standard of living. You might occasionally need to summon a bit of “sisu” on a pitch black, minus 20 degrees January morning, but it’s nothing a Woolrich parka can’t fix. In deep summer or deep winter Helsinki – don’t ask about November – it is difficult to imagine anywhere better.
Yet in places, that success bred complacency, and by “places” I mean the pre-iPhone era Nokia and some of its other heritage brands. These last weeks suggest that Finnish design can no longer afford to be complacent. Nokia single-handedly contributed a third of Finland’s entire corporate research and development as recently as last year; that is unlikely to happen again. Similarly, Artek has to try hard to prevent the sheer weight of its gilded past from holding it back. People might say, “those E60 stools won’t sell themselves!” Actually, they probably will. What they sell next is the question.
So building on and respecting these rich legacies is important, but moving on is more important. Again, Finland has every chance to do so.
Soon the Finns will witness “ruska” spread across the nation, from Aalto’s moonbase-style buildings in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, down to the rapidly greying Baltic off the capital. Ruska occurs when birch, larch and rowan trees explode into russet tones of richly saturated purples, reds, yellows and oranges, before shivering off their leaves for winter. It’s an extraordinary vivid and life-affirming cycle.
Finnish design needs a similarly florid and dramatic replenishment. While the trajectories sketched above are mere suggestions, the recent seismic activity at its two most iconic brands, Artek and Nokia – one a tremor, the other a quake – provides the perfect opportunity for re-imagining Finnish design in the twenty-first century.
Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and design studio based in Treviso, Italy. He is an adjunct professor in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at University of Technology, Sydney, and his blog City of Sound covers the intersection between cities, design, culture and technology.
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News: Finnish studio ALA Architects has won the international competition to design a new public library in Helsinki with plans that involve a mass of twisted timber (+ slideshow).
Launched in January 2012, the competition asked applicants to come up with a timeless, flexible and energy-efficient building to sit opposite the Finnish Parliament building in the Töölönlahti area of the city.
ALA Architects‘ response is for a three-storey structure comprising a contorted timber volume. Public activities and group study areas will occupy an active ground floor beneath the curving wooden surfaces, while a traditionally quiet reading room will be located above and a contemporary media facility and public sauna will be housed in the middle.
Two main entrances will provide access to the building. A public plaza in front of the western facade is to lead into a main lobby, where a staircase will spiral up to the floors above, while a second entrance will face the railway station to the south and offer an escalator that penetrates the wooden volume overhead.
“The architecture of the proposal is of a very high quality, executed with relaxed, broad strokes, and memorable,” commented the competition organisers.
They added: “The proposal provides excellent premises for the development of a completely new functional concept for the library. The building has a unique appeal and the prerequisites to become the new symbolic building which Helsinki residents, library users, as well as the staff will readily adopt as their own.”
ALA Architects, who is also based in Helsinki, plans to use local materials such as Siberian larch to construct the Helsinki Central Library and it is scheduled to open in 2018.
Here’s some extra information from ALA Architects:
ALA Architects wins Helsinki Central Library competition
ALA Architects have won the design competition for the new Helsinki Central Library with their entry Käännös. The open international two-stage competition attracted 544 entries from all over the world. The 16,000 square metre library building in the heart of Helsinki will consist almost entirely of public spaces and will offer a wide selection of services. It will serve as the new central point for the city’s impressive public library network. The Central Library is slated to open in 2018.
The winning entry is based on the idea of dividing the functions of the library into three distinctive levels: an active ground floor, a calm upper floor, and an enclosed in-between volume containing the more specific functions. This concept has been developed into an arching form that invites people to utilise the spaces and services underneath, inside and on top of it. The resulting building will be an inspiring and highly functional addition to the urban life of Helsinki and the nationally significant Töölönlahti area.
ALA is one of the leading Nordic architecture firms. The office has previously completed the Kilden Performing Arts Centre in Kristiansand, Norway, and is currently working on a number of large public projects in Finland including two theaters, five subway stations, and a passenger ferry hub. Käännös has been designed by ALA partners Juho Grönholm, Antti Nousjoki, Janne Teräsvirta and Samuli Woolston together with the ALA project team, assisted by the engineering experts at Arup.
Description of the winning entry Käännös
Käännös grows from the dynamic between the site and the goals of the library program. The interplay between the building’s three individual floors is the key concept of the entry.
The public plaza in front of the building will continue inside, merging with a catalogue of meeting and experience features. The ground floor will be a robust, busy and frequently updated space suitable for quick visits and walkthroughs. The active, zero-threshold public spaces will be visible, attractive, understandable and welcoming to all visitors.
The traditional, serene library atmosphere can be found on the top floor. This will be a calm area for contemplation, floating above the busy central Helsinki. It will offer unobstructed, majestic views to the surrounding park and cityscape.These two contrasting spaces that perfectly complement each other are created by an arching wooden volume. The spaces inside the volume will be enclosed and more intimate. The wooden volume is stretched vertically to create connections to the open main floors below and above. Soft, curved shapes will be present all around the building.
The curved ceiling covering the ground floor, the intensive flowing spaces on the middle level, as well as the curving floor surface of the top floor are all defined in the timber-clad mass, which is as functional as it is expressive.
There will be three public entrance points in the building: one in the south for the main pedestrian flow from the direction of the Central Railway Station, one next to the public plaza to the west of the building shielded by an overhanging canopy, as well as a secondary one in the northeastern corner. The top floor can be reached from the southern entrance by an escalator that penetrates the wooden volume, or from the main lobby via a spiraling double-helix stair.
Each floor will be a destination in its own right and a new exciting civic space in the heart of Helsinki. While being a traditional library space, the top floor will also act as a modern, open, flexible platform for a multitude of functions. The middle floor will offer opportunities for learning-by-doing in an environment optimised for contemporary media and latest tools. It will contain workshop spaces for music and multimedia, as well as a public sauna. A multipurpose hall, a restaurant and a cinema will be located on ground floor. The library’s facilities will offer services, as well as places to meet, to discuss, and to present ideas.
The library building will be extremely energy efficient. It will be constructed using local materials and with local climate conditions in mind. Some of the main load-bearing components will be made of timber. The wooden façade will be built from pre-assembled elements finished on-site. 30 millimetre thick Finnish first grade Siberian Larch wood, shaped with a parametric 3D design and manufacturing process in order to achieve a perfect execution of the desired geometry, will be used for the cladding. The appearance of the façade will develop over the years towards a deeper, richer version of its initial hue. The design of the façade is intrinsic to the passive design approach adopted by the project team. Detailed analysis of the façade performance informs the environmental solutions and has allowed the team to minimise any systems required, which in turn facilitates the highly flexible architectural solution.
About the competition and the Helsinki City Library
Helsinki Central Library will serve as the new center point for Helsinki’s impressive public library network. It will be located in the very heart of Helsinki, in the Töölönlahti area, opposite the Finnish Parliament building. As its neighbors it will have some of the city’s most important public buildings; the Helsinki Music Centre, the Sanoma House, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art designed by Steven Holl, Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall, and the Central Railway Station by Eliel Saarinen, as well as several new office and residential buildings still partially under construction on the site of a former railway yard.
The open international two-stage architectural competition was launched in January 2012, and attracted 544 entries from all over the world. The six entries selected for further development for the second phase of the competition were announced in November 2012. The Central Library is slated to open in 2018.
The goal of the competition has been to find a timeless and energy-efficient design solution that responds to the challenges set by the location. The library building should complement and adjust to the urban fabric of the Töölönlahti area. The building is to express the operational concepts of a library in a way that offers a technically and spatially flexible framework for cutting-edge, adaptable library operations, now and in the future. It will reflect the technical and cultural changes taking place in the society, particularly evident in the media world.
Library operations are statutory in Finland. Basic library services are free of charge and freely available to everyone. The new 16,000 square metre (approx. 172,000 square foot) library building will consist almost entirely of public spaces. The administrative and storage functions of Helsinki Public Library will remain at the main library in Pasila. In terms of services offered, the new library will be the largest public library in the Helsinki metropolitan area, and will most certainly become the metropolitan area’s most popular spot for returns and reservations. It has been estimated that the library will attract 5,000 visitors per day and 1.5 million visitors per year.
The new library will be at the forefront of the renewal of the city’s library services. In addition to the basic operations, there will be a wide range of services available inside the building, as well as an abundance of lounge spaces and auxiliary services that support the operations. The library will enliven and diversify the new urban environment created in the Töölönlahti area. It will offer activities and experiences for all ages. There will be plenty of spaces that enable people to spend time together, free of charge. The role of the clients will evolve from passive media users to active agents, participants and content producers. As a non-commercial open public space, the new Helsinki Central Library will act as a common living room and work space.
La société Flatlight Films a réalisé cette très belle vidéo appelée « Land of The Midnight Sun » pour la promotion touristique du pays de la Finlande. Rappelant que ce pays est bien connu pour son soleil de minuit, cette création réunissant de très jolies images est à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
