HDW HOP 2017: A micro-size apartment house shows how densely we’ll live in the future
The HDW HOP series presents installations enlivening the city centreduring Helsinki Design Week from 7 to 17 September 2017.
Major urban installations take over the city for the second time during Helsinki Design Week. The installation series consists of works by Finnish and international designers and architects, addressing the theme of ‘developing city’.
All installations and their designers are presented in Helsinki Design Weekly. We’ll celebrate the opening of the HDW HOP installation series together with all Helsinki people on the 7th of September.
The next work to introduce is the Tikku installation designed by Marco Casagrande. Its idea is to build a parking space size mini apartment house over night. To be built on Keskuskatu, Tikku is a demonstration of the dense residential development of the future as well as Finnish wood construction.
Made of CLT massive wood structure, Tikku has been prefabricated at Woodpolis in Kuhmo, a training and product development organization for wood construction. All wood materials used in the project are from sustainably grown forests and PEFC certified. The certification ensures that the timber can be reliably traced all through the processing chain.
The small residence built in the city centre functions as a workspace during Helsinki Design Week. The second floor ‘workspace of the future’ is built in cooperation with Sponda. Sponda owns several well-known office and retail properties in Helsinki, including the Makkaratalo building, the Fennia building and the Forum shopping centre.”The Tikku installation is an artistic take on urbanization and the densification of cities, which are trends that also influence office space needs and offerings. The dense cities of the future will need to provide more flexible working environments which are not necessarily limited to four walls,” says Anita Riikonen, Sponda’s Marketing and Brand Manager.
The house is decorated in cooperation with BoConcept. The decor will include Karin Rashid’s newest creation, the Ottawa sofa. The multifunctional modular sofa blends into any surroundings.
The plants of the third floor greenroom and other arrangements are carried out in cooperation with Plantagen.
Q&A: Tikku
Who are you and of which existing works are you particularly proud?
I am Marco Casagrande of Casagrande Laboratory.
Installations revolving around the core of architecture are all dear to me; so are small wooden houses and ruins. Bug Dome and Sandworm were learned from insects and reflect ‘weak architecture’. The CLT apartment houses now being built direct us towards the future. Paracity is interesting and must be built.
How did you come up with the idea of the installation?
We build module-based apartment houses of CLT, and basically Tikku is a plain version of those. For quite a while, I’ve been thinking about this through the idea of ‘city acupuncture’. I mean, we have plenty of parking spaces, and we could use them to build different types of Tikkus; lots of healing acupuncture for an industrial city.
All installations study the development of cities. What ideas do you have about the theme and how does your work express the theme?
City space has been measured to accommodate cars. Tikku enables calibrating the space back to human scale. In a way Tikku is an acupuncture needle in the mechanical weave of the industrial city – it directs the city towards the organic.
Why should people come see your installation?
It smells like future.
What is the city of the future like? What must be remembered when developing cities?
The city of the future is an organic ruin of the industrial city, a structural swamp of people – a massive, self-inflating organism… a high-tech slum.
