AAprompt - Booklet

Assignment

The AD museum must excel at telling the story of how Nordic - and expecially Finnish design and architecture have had influence across the world and helped shapemore equal sociaty.

Vision:

1.Sharing the tools of design with the broad public (workshop spaces, tools and inspirational examples)

2. Creating a place of Collaboration between educational institutions, NGO's, businesses and the public (a place for meeting, co-working spaces and events and conferences)

3. Creating spaces that should help us pose bold questions about diffrent posibilities and sustainability and invite the people to learn about the past in order to reshape the future environmnet

Goals:

Welcoming and Hospitable

The building and its spaces create an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere for all kinds of museum users,
The museum encourage museum users to linger, reflect, sit, lie down and recharge
By integrating natural elements throughout the museum grounds and building, the spaces become tranquil oases in the urban environment.
The design of the building embraces holistic accessibility

2. A Unique Experience

The building seamlessly integrates with the cityscape and urban waterfront in terms of scale, massing and orientation.

The building design, including its immediate outdoor and public areas, makes connections with the city and the Baltic Sea.
Starting before entering the museum and continuing inside, the building creates a unique spatial experience that is itself an expression of the possibilities of architecture as an artistic field and as a generator of public life.
Spaces throughout the building are not neutral, but use architectural means to create moments of drama as well as calmness and reflection.

3. A Creative Playground

The museum building invites its users to boost their creative confidence by encouraging them to make, test, touch and embrace the chaos and creativity of the imaginative process.
Spaces mix programmes and juxtapose activities, triggering curiosity and unexpected resonances.
The building offers everyday spaces where past and future converge
The building provokes new ideas by blurring boundaries between processes, revealing behindthe-scenes activities and creating interfaces between professionals, the museum staff and the general public.

4. Flexible & Hybrid

Using outdoor and indoor spaces will enable a mix of programmes and events on varying scales.
Versatility and adaptability for unpredictable futures is key. Adaptable infrastructure should allow for spaces to be reconfigured in the future.
Public areas of the museum should be optimised for hybrid programming that brings together different audience groups at different times of the day and year.

The plot is situated at the point of tension between several urban and natural attractors. It is also situated at the inflection point of the modern rectangular grid which borders with the proposed urban plan SAARET. We took into account those tensions when sketching our main direction lines. The plot is a moment in a sequence of spaces.

We identified important neighbors, conceptually we dedicated different volumetric elements of our building to them and further linked them with our choice of indoor and outdoor programme. By proximity, we noticed that our neighbors define 5 areas of influence so we used a 5 area diagram to further structure our design. Into a 360 deg experience from the ground floor up till the roof.

Each of those 5 elements receive influence from surrounding and distant neighbors:

1. The Old Market Hall - Central Market waterfront pedestrian: The building connects to the waterfront with the roof facing the Old Market and Central Market. A low facade brings the volume closer to human scale.

[closeup view showing program on the roof]

2. Waterfront pedestrian North to South-East: facade curved and setback defines an urban plaza along the waterfront pedestrian.

[diagram with the pubic circulation and public program]

3. Saaret and the Sea: The facade curves along SAARET inviting pedestrians to explore further around the building. The roof is higher on the South side of the building, as a Lighthouse connecting the upper levels with the Sea.

[diagram 2 showing the high point of the roof above saaret line ]

4. Tähtitorninvuori Hill: In section, the building borrows the slope of the hill as a volumetric continuation of this natural element emphasized by the roof. The building mass is higher on the South side and lower on the Noth.

5. Eteläranta - Laivasillankatu. Special attention has been given to the South-West facade of the building with a ground floor setback as a continuation of the Tähtitorninvuori slope inviting pedestrians underneath a large porch (portico) . A setback following the SAAret alignment.

In the end those 5 elements, with their different influences, connect together creating one large roof with the tip adjusted to resemble a finnish tent.

The tent unfolds and expands into 5 outdoor urban plazas on top of our museum.

The ground floor has been structured in order to stimulate pedestrian circulation around the building

The idea of an urban theater came from a distant urban neighbor: the Swedish Theater. The new Finnish outdoor theater proposed on the roof, reinforces the urban angle pointing towards the old market.