Platform Pavilion / Maiju Suomi + Elina Koivisto
Platform Pavilion / Maiju Suomi + Elina Koivisto
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Text description provided by the architects. The platform pavilion is located Helsinki The courtyard of the Design Museum and the Architecture Museum offers space for multispecies encounters from June 2022 to October 2023. The research pavilion investigates the intertwining quality of nature and culture and looks for ways to take care of biodiversity in urban environments. The pavilion serves as a platform for environmental discourse both in terms of its materiality and multi-sensory experience, as well as the various activities that take place there. It consists of structures made of pollinator-friendly grass and clay in different shapes; unfired and fired brick and compacted earth. The platform is implemented by a multidisciplinary team led by architects Maiju Suomen and Elina Koivisto.
The needs of non-human guests, various pollinating insects such as bees, bumblebees and butterflies, were investigated together with ecology researchers. Pollinator-friendly perennials together with rotting wood provide food and shelter for insects. Porous clay structures simultaneously create space for people and allow non-human animals to enter and live in them as they wish.
At the material level, the goal of the pavilion is to make the space as ecological as possible. Earth is present as living soil and clay in different forms. With the help of both unfired and fired clay, possibilities to limit the use of energy in construction are explored. Clay plaster mixed with biochar and biochar elements represent new possibilities in material research and promote the aesthetic structure of the place. When the pavilion closes, the plants in their planting containers move elsewhere to continue their lives. The raw clay returns to the ground and the burnt elements are reused in another building.
The platform invites us to rethink our place more than in the human community. The pavilion takes shape together with plants, humans and non-human animals, natural processes and the passage of time, challenging our understanding of the individual human factor. The material has its own agency in the space formation process. The pavilion is not designed as an object with clear outlines in space and time, but as a process in a constant state of change. The edges fade and become porous, architecture rather binds together than separates.
Human guests have been able to participate in the construction of the pavilion through clay building workshops, planting and bokashi composting. In the summer of 2022, 23 different programs will be organized there; e.g. nest building clay workshops for families with small children, sustainable architecture summer schools for high school students, lecture and discussion programs for design professionals and open cultural programs such as media art shows and poetry workshops.