Photos from university study trip to Helsinki during MArch. This trip was an exercise in masterplanning where we worked in the Aalto University. We were given a derelict site in which to propose a masterplan for. When exploring the site we found the memoial ‘Työläinen on Iähtenyt / The Worker Has Left’. When researching we found that the memorial was for the sister power plant to the existing power plant on the site, that was demolished with the result of thousands of people lossing their jobs.
This as our inspiration, we took the theme of production – ‘The worker has returned’ and looked at how a new development could be designed to produce in a variety of ways.
We looked at the different ways ‘production’ could work. This included food production, gardens and fisheries also energy (sustainable) creative arts and tourism. Our masterplan is a sustainable utopia – every citizen would be a ‘worker’ whether that is in their profession or in contributing with the production of food etc.
We created a collage as we didn’t think that the ‘production’ would be zoned but would feed into each other. The collage method allowed us to be much more free with where certain ‘industries’ would be. When presenting to the tutors, the collage method was felt to be successful and, taken literally, the city could be a granular form and how would that work?
We decided that we didn’t want to zone at all, and this proved difficult to design. Therefore we invented a game; based on the game of consequences we all started the ground floor, folded over the paper and passed it to another member of the group. Aside from hilarious results we realised that maybe the buildings are all mixed use with a variety of ‘production methods’ occurring in each building. This overlapping of uses is also represented in the form of the buildings which overlap on top of each other.
During the trip we visited Aalto’s Studio, University, Home.
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