For the Taivallahti Residential Area competition in Helsinki Stephen Holl beat Jo-Coenen, Dominique Perrault, and Cino Zucchi to win. This is Stephen Holl’s second success in Helsinki after Kiasma (some slides here) and actually I don’t know of any other project by a foreign Architect completed in Finland other than this one! The winning entry looks quite different from the normal blockhouse prefab we are used to in this part of the world and for that alone is a worthy winner, but while being a single entity, not too out of scale either and has a real clear and cleaver concept, hope it gets built! From Holl’s website;
The site is enclosed by the Taivallahti Barracks, two apartment buildings and an office block……The 180 meter long glass building with a height varying from two to seven floors, meanders across the rectangular courtyard like a musical score, shaping garden void spaces within the block.
Update: No word on whether this will get built or not. There is a gallery of the project probably only for posterity.
