Jätkäsaari Housing Reform, Helsinki FI, 2019
Social contacts – both close and transient – are as essential or even more important to human health than the so-called healthy lifestyle. The house is designed to strengthen community on different scales and at different levels: in its surroundings, it is a center of the neighborhood with its street level activities; on reaching the large stairs to the courtyard it offers its inhabitants a green outdoor living room; residents retrieve their mail from the mailboxes in the common lobby; in the courtyard-level common spaces eight- or eighty-year-old birthdays are celebrated, hockey is watched with neighbors, and yoga is practiced on Sunday mornings; the sheltering staircases and pleasant corridors are not only a network that connects all the spaces in the house, but also a place to stay and chat with your immediate neighbors; common laundry rooms in each floor bring social potential to everyday tasks; the common roof sauna and the roof terraces with spectacular views; and finally the winter gardens shared with the next door neighbor, creating semi-public or intimate semi-private situations. The house is a frame where it is difficult to avoid getting to know your neighbor, but where everyone can choose to what extent and when they want to be involved. The house provides the individual with a home port, as well as a framework for life that creates the birth and identity of the community.Client Helsinki City, open competition, 2nd prize
Time 2019
Team Tommi Mäkynen, Mirjam Niemeyer, Aleksandra Smith, Eva Nováková, Agnieszka Gmaj
