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Architects: Elina Koivisto, Maiju Suomi
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Maiju Suomi, Anne Kinnunen, Anni Koponen
Text description provided by the architects. Alusta pavilion located in Helsinki in the courtyard of the Designmuseum and the Museum of Finnish Architecture offers a space for multispecies encounters from June 2022 until October 2023. The research pavilion explores the intertwined quality of nature and culture and searches for ways to care for biodiversity in urban environments. The pavilion functions as a platform for environmental discourse, both on the level of its materiality and multisensory experience, and the different activities which take place there. It comprises a pollinator-friendly meadow and structures made with clay in different forms; unfired and fired brick and rammed earth. Alusta is realized by a multidisciplinary group led by architects Maiju Suomi and Elina Koivisto.
The needs of the non-human visitors, different pollinating insects such as bees, bumble bees, and butterflies, were identified together with ecology researchers. Polinator-friendly perennial plants together with decaying wood offer nutrition and shelter for insects. The porous clay structures simultaneously form space for humans and allow non-human animals to enter and inhabit them as they wish.
On the material level, the pavilion aims to make space as ecologically as possible. Earth is present as living soil and clay in different forms. Through the use of both unfired and fired clay, the possibilities for limiting energy use in construction are explored. Clay plaster mixed with biochar and the biochar elements represent new possibilities in material research and contribute to the aesthetic texture of the place. When the pavilion closes the plants will move in their planting containers elsewhere to continue their life. Raw clay will return to the ground and the fired elements will be reused in another building.
Alusta invites us to reconsider our place in the more than human community. The pavilion takes its shape together with the plants, human and non-human animals, natural processes, and passage of time, thus questioning our understanding of singular human authorship. The materials have their own agency in the process of forming the space. The pavilion is not conceived as an object with clear outlines in space and time, but rather as a process in a constant state of becoming. Borders fade and become porous, architecture rather binds together than separates.
The human visitors have been able to take part in the construction of the pavilion through clay building workshops, planting, and bokashi-composting activities. During the summer of 2022 and 23 different kinds of programs will take place there; e.g. nest building clay workshops for families with young children, sustainable architecture summer schools for high school students, lecture and discussion programs for design professionals, and open cultural programs such as media-art screenings and poetry workshops.
