How two architects from Helsinki turned a parking lot into a pollinator’s paradise
Welcome to Wildlife Week, an event exploring what happens when nature and home meet.
It seems we are out of touch. Often our homes, offices, and cities are orderable boxes built around more boxes, forming barriers that reduce chaos in favor of control, leaving us far from any other form of life. According to self-described environmental architects Elina Koivisto and Maiju Suomen, you can’t live like this. They say that if we want to design a more sustainable future, we need to figuratively – and literally – break down the walls we’ve been conditioned to build.
As one example of how we can awaken the connection with Mother Earth, Koivisto and Finland presented a pollinator and plant paradise in June of this year in the parking lot between the Design Museum and the Architecture Museum in their hometown of Helsinki. Called the Alusta Pavilion, the pop-up park’s exposed framework of clay bricks and wooden beams creates an inviting habitat for birds, bees, insects, plants and fungi, and an unexpected place where human visitors can get up close and personal with the vibrant space. ecosystem.
Pedestrians who come across the project are pleasantly surprised by the pop of greenery, but the pavilion has also served as a starting point for a discussion about sustainable construction and natural processes in academic environments: with ecology researchers who helped Finland and Koivisto to translate the needs. to a model built of plants and insects; In the series hosted by Aalto University’s Department of Design, where the project is part of Finland’s doctoral studies; and with children from the summer camp hosted by the Museum of Architecture.
Now that the pavilion is largely at the whim of Finland and Koivisto’s “customers” – the pollinators and their plant friends – what happens next is beyond their control in terms of design. And that’s where things get interesting. Here, the architects tell us what went into creating the pavilion, what happens when we hand over the authority of the built environment to natural processes, and how connection with other species, even for a moment in the middle of the city, can be repaired. our relationship with nature.
Live: Are you environmental architects – can you explain to us head-scratchers what that is?
Maiju Finland:I’d say it’s two-sided. I will first refer to Susan Hagen, the British professor of architecture who defined the field. He says that if architecture is to be seen as an environmental act or environmental architecture, it should try to improve nature in some way – you protect the living conditions of all species. At the same time, it is not only a practical act, it is also art. We want to communicate on a symbolic level the responsibility of architecture to create better environments.
Tell us about your latest work, the Alusta pavilion. How did it take shape? How is it an example of environmental architecture?
Finland: We wanted to take an urban place, this parking lot between the museums in Helsinki, and see how we could bring more life – add biodiversity where it was lacking. In this case, we decided it would be interesting to work with pollinating insects because it’s such an easy way to communicate [human] needs with the needs of other species. In practice, we therefore wanted to create a space where both pollinating insects could enjoy themselves and at the same time humans could feel good.
Elina Koivisto:The pavilion has these benches that run into the vegetation. So you get to decide how much you want to interact with the insects. [Academic] Donna Haraway has a concept of “intimacy without closeness” and this is something we kept in mind when designing. We do not want to create conflicts between the species, but to facilitate coexistence.
How did you choose to build between the two museums? Who is the pavilion intended for?
Finland: We built in between museums because that’s where people are often open to new ideas. They can embrace this kind of thinking—how we challenge deeply held notions of humanity’s place in the world. But at the same time, we wanted to reach many professionals who make decisions in their working life. Our big goal here has been to awaken design professionals to see that when we build something, we operate in places that are already alive. They are not empty spaces without life. We always do an intervention in a really complex place that already has its own processes.
How are things going? Are people and insects interacting with the pavilion in ways you expected or didn’t expect?
Upper leg: The Finnish Museum of Architecture organized a summer school for young people, in these week-long camps where they can learn about architecture. A girl from the camp said that normally she is afraid of stinging insects, but she felt comfortable in the pavilion. I think it’s because we created so much vegetation. All these flowering plants are around. The insects have such a good buffet there that they don’t need to bother people.
Finland: And a lot of people have said, Okay, what should I plant in my garden if I want to do the same thing? I have this big garden, but I never thought I could do this. And then we can say, okay, here’s a list of 50 plants that you can easily grow at home. And they get other ideas, like bringing clay to different birds to build their nests, or leaving rotting wood on the ground instead of taking it away. These are really small but practical things.
It is clear that the pavilion is very intentional from a design point of view. But the plants and pollinators make it such a living, growing experiment. How do you reconcile the elements within your control with those outside of it?
Finland: That’s really the crux of the matter. In urban environments, we are very used to the idea that people need to be under control. And that’s what we do as architects – we manage things. We wanted to challenge that by giving agency to the non-human participants in this project. So the way we see it is that we’ve built the place to some extent; we brought in the clay structures and soil. And then we “invited” participants, like plants and rotting wood and fungi, and insects and people. But we designed it to change as natural processes occur. We see that the space becomes complete only when the plants grow.
It is this test for ourselves and the people experiencing it to see how we react to the lack of control. Like, how does it feel if we don’t see space as something we make once—it’s whole and then it’s broken—but as processes. We wanted to explore the idea of how things gradually change: decay, death and then rebirth.
Did this thinking apply to your choice of material?
Lower leg: Yes, we think about the entire life of the materials. Where do they come from and where do they go later? We chose clay and used a little bit of wood, but we wanted to use clay because its harvesting process is environmentally friendly. And then when you build with raw clay, you can basically take it back to the well you took it from.
How should visitors to the pavilion see themselves in the context of these natural processes? What do you hope they walk away with?
Lower leg: In the future, we will have to get used to these processes if we want to continue living on this planet. Instead of creating something new and shiny and then, as you said, Maiju, it breaks, so we tear it down and start over, we should get used to an architecture that can change over time. This is needed for a more sustainable life.
Finland: We want to challenge the culture between people and nature and see ourselves as part of these processes – part of a network where everything affects everything. We need to critically examine this hierarchical idea that we are above nature. We need to be more humble and recognize that our actions affect all other actions. The pavilion challenges that hierarchical thinking, it creates the basis for a new kind of attitude towards the natural world, of which we are a strong part.