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.
Update2 (24.11.2008): The gallery above only contains the Cino Zucchi entry. Information of the winning entry by Stephen Holl you can find here.
2 Comments
I also hope it will be built, though I did not see any signs of that in the summer. In the gallery, why do you have the Cino Zucchi entry instead of Meander?
Sirkka,
Hello and thanks for the comment. I had a conversation with a college this summer about the building and as far he knew there were some problems with the negotiation of the site with the Army. So it looks like for the moment it’s not going to happen, and in the current economic environment I think we can safetly assume we won’t see it being built at all. A real real shame as housing design desperately needs a lift in Finland generally.
As for the gallery link you are right, I thought it contained all the entries but it seems not. I’ve updated the main post with a link to the Holl project on his website that has some excellent drawings.