SPRING 2022 iconeye.com

THE NORDIC ISSUE

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CONTENTS

On the cover

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Hlöðuberg Artist’s Studio (2021) in Iceland, by Studio Bua. Photograph by Marino Thorlacius Click on the article titles to navigate to the content

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Front

Focus

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EDITOR’S LETTER

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CONTRIBUTORS

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CRIMES AGAINST DESIGN Tara Okeke interrogates the humble yet villainous plastic shopping bag – invented by a Swedish engineer

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OPINION In terms of early architectural education, the UK should learn from Finland, argues Fiona MacDonald

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OPINION Coastal cities should adapt their industrial harbours to contemporary public needs, says Hanna Harris

IMAGE: JAN M LILLEBØ

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OPINION It’s time to rethink our reliance on concrete for good, explains Anna Graaf – and Sweden might point the way

Spring 2022

THE ICON INTERVIEW: DORTE MANDRUP Debika Ray meets the Danish architect making waves across the Nordic region and beyond

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SCANDI MAXIMALISM Riya Patel surveys the Nordic designers bucking the minimalist trend

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UNDER WATER In Denmark, landscape architects have been rethinking the urban fabric to build flood resilience amid the impacts of climate change

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WORKING REMOTELY From Iceland to Norway, building in remote rural spots comes with a host of unusual challenges. Ellinor Thunberg explores

Design 104

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WASTE NOT Ellinor Thunberg meets the designers using food waste to create furniture pieces and promote circularity FLÉTTA The Icelandic design duo takes discarded materials and turns them into desirable new objects

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INTIMATE FASHION Design Museum Helsinki’s Intimacy exhibition showcases a new generation of Finnish fashion innovators Q&A: SIMON SKINNER We meet the Swedish industrial designer interrogating the notion of ‘Swedishness’

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GALLERY Bragi Þór Jósefsson has been photographing all of Iceland’s outdoor swimming pools – we pick our favourites

ICON: RISOM LOUNGE CHAIR Jens Risom’s celebrated chair for Knoll was an early pioneer of circular design

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CONTENTS

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Click on the article titles to navigate to the content

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Architecture 144

A MACHINE FOR DANCE Lee Marable visits the new Dance House Helsinki by JKMM Architects

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Q&A: JOAR NANGO Reanna Merasty meets the Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect, whose work explores Indigenous identity and creativity

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COMING CLEAN IN OSLO The Norwegian capital’s mission for zero-emission construction is not without its challenges

IMAGES: TUOMAS UUSHEIMO / PER MYREHED

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ICON: TOPPILA SILO Alvar Aalto’s wood chip silo in northern Finland is being given a new lease of life as an architectural research centre

Spring 2022

Review 180

SIGURD LEWERENTZ A major exhibition at Stockholm’s ArkDes explores the work of the iconic Swedish architect

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END NOTE Superflex’s co-designed play sculptures in Billund

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QUEST A new SEAQUAL fabric, made from recycled marine plastic. #seasickofplastic

FRONT

Editor’s letter

RIGHT Rugs made from waste denim by Flétta

IMAGE: SAGA SIGURÐARDÓTTIR / PORTRAIT: HARRIET THORPE

Francesca Perry Editor

AND SO WE kick off a new year at ICON, and there’s a lot to look forward to. Firstly, our partner – the team behind Clerkenwell Design Week and Design London – is launching a brand new contemporary design festival in Finland this summer: Design Helsinki. Taking place 24-25 August across the Finnish capital, the inaugural event will bring together the most exciting and creative brands from the country with a range of international talent. It’s a perfect opportunity for us at ICON to look at design and architecture in Finland and the wider region – so welcome, then, to our Nordic issue. In the design world, ‘Nordic’ has become shorthand for a kind of mid-century, minimal aesthetic – but there is so much more to the region’s design story than this. For this issue, Riya Patel delves into the world of a new wave of maximalist designers from the region – creating riotously colourful, joyful objects that buck expectations – and Allyssia Alleyne meets an emerging generation of innovative fashion designers from Helsinki, creating both subversive and sensuous clothes. Tara Okeke, meanwhile, revisits an unexpected Nordic design villain: the plastic shopping bag, which was developed by Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin. Despite this climate-unfriendly creation, the region now seems to be a leading centre for circular design. Nordic designers and architects are busy pushing the bounds of how we can better embed the circular economy in everyday creativity and our built environment. We meet Icelandic design duo Flétta, which transforms discarded materials into unusual new objects, as well as Norwegian architecture practice Mad Arkitekter, prioritising recycled construction materials. We also find out more about the furniture designers working with food waste, and look back to a surprising Nordic pioneer of upcycling, Jens Risom, who used discarded parachute webbing from wartime supplies to create his iconic Lounge Chair in 1943. A realisation I made while putting together this issue is that the first woman to officially become an architect – Signe Hornborg, in 1890 – was Finnish. It is fitting, then, that our ICON interview this issue focuses on a female architect currently making waves across the Nordic region: Dorte Mandrup. Interviewed by Debika Ray, she discusses how her work – from a visitor’s centre in Greenland to a museum in Berlin – is deeply rooted in social and environmental context. Mandrup’s upcoming project, The Whale, is located on the Norwegian island of Andøya, 300km north of the Arctic Circle. Indeed, the Nordic region is home to some of the most extreme climates, sparsely populated landscapes and hard-toaccess locations; in this issue, Ellinor Thunberg takes us on a journey to some of the most remote architecture in Iceland and Norway, and the stories and architectural feats behind their realisation (would you take a horse three hours each way just to build a house?). There’s so much more in here: JKMM’s Dance House Helsinki, Swedish product designer Simon Skinner, the innovative Danish projects tackling urban flooding, Sámi-Norwegian architect and artist Joar Nango, the transformation of Alvar Aalto’s Toppila Silo, Icelandic swimming pools, Sigurd Lewerentz – and plenty more besides. [email protected]

Spring 2022

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FRONT

Editor Francesca Perry Art Director Robin Farley Sub Editor Sarah Cutforth

ADVERTISING

PRODUCTION

Design Division Director Marlon Cera-Marle

Production Administrator Mickie Dipple

Sales Executive Orla Tickton

PUBLISHING

For advertising enquiries please contact [email protected] MARKETING Contributors: Allyssia Alleyne, Amy Frearson, Anna Graaf, Hanna Harris, Bragi Þór Jósefsson, Fiona MacDonald, Lee Marable, Reanna Merasty, Tara Okeke, Riya Patel, Debika Ray, Lemma Shehadi, Ellinor Thunberg, Herbert Wright

Chief Executive Officer Lee Newton Managing Director Richard Morey

ICON is published quarterly by Clerkenwell Design Week Ltd Crown House 151 High Road Loughton IG10 4LF United Kingdom tel: +44 20 3225 5200 fax: +44 20 3225 5201 subscriptions: +44 1858 438428 [email protected] [email protected] iconeye.com @iconeye facebook.com/iconeye

Senior Marketing Manager Jedd Barry Assistant Marketing Manager Shoshana Espeut Marketing Assistant Elmaz Ramadan

Professional Publishers Association

Contributors Ellinor Thunberg is a journalist and writer based in Gothenburg. In her first series of pieces for ICON, she delves into the world of remote architectural projects, meets designers working with food waste and reviews ArkDes’ show on Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz.

Lee Marable is an architect, designer and writer based in Helsinki. In his first piece for ICON, he visits and reviews JKMM Architects’ Dance House Helsinki, a new cultural project aiming to make an impact on the Finnish capital. 

Debika Ray is a design writer and editor based in London. For this issue, she interviews leading Danish architect Dorte Mandrup about her context-driven work. 

Amy Frearson is a London-based writer and editor. In this issue, she reports on the Danish landscape architects delivering innovative projects in Copenhagen to tackle flash flooding. 

Reanna Merasty is a Winnipegbased architectural intern from Barren Lands First Nation, and the co-founder of the Indigenous Design and Planning Student Association at the University of Manitoba. For this issue, she interviews Sámi-Norwegian architect and artist Joar Nango. 

Riya Patel is a London-based design journalist and curator, and a former senior editor at ICON. In this issue, she surveys the new wave of designers bucking the Scandi minimalist mould by delivering joyful, maximalist designs – and meets Icelandic design duo Flétta.

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FRONT / CRIMES AGAINST DESIGN

CRIMES AGAINST DESIGN

The plastic shopping bag Its design proved so universal – and disposable – that it’s now facing bans. But, asks Tara Okeke, was this the future the bag’s Swedish inventor expected?

MARCH MARKS THE opening of Plastic: Remaking Our World at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. Billed as an unpacking of the ‘utopian appeal’ of, arguably, the world’s most contested material, the exhibition comes hot on the heels of Waste Age: What can design do? at London’s Design Museum and The Waste Refinery at Singapore’s National Design Centre. That makes for three plastic-centric or plastic-adjacent design exhibitions within the space of a year. Each show was conceived to grapple with, to varying degrees, the impact of the mass-produced material world – primarily

plastics – on design culture, consumer choice and the climate. The environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman recently wrote in The Atlantic: ‘At no other juncture in its history [...] has plastics faced the scrutiny it does now.’ Altman’s assessment of this moment – indirectly – frames the aforementioned exhibitions as Very Now™ and veritably inevitable; my own assessment skews facetious: two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the filing of the patent of plastic’s most innocuous, but worst offending,

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by-product: the shopping bag. Created by Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin in 1959 – with the patent officially granted in 1965, three years subsequent to its filing – this (until recently) staple of our supermarkets and (grimly, still) our seas did not win the hearts and minds of shoppers immediately. Many were sceptical of the polyethylene contraption’s load-bearing credentials, and it was not until 1979 that the ‘bag with handle of weldable plastic material’ laid claim to an overwhelming majority share of the European bag market. In the UK, despite the introduction of the single-use carrier bag levy in 2015 – and the significant inroads to waste reduction said levy made possible – reported circulation of plastic shopping bags in the country was still as high as 594 million between 2019 and 2020. The problem with plastic bags is, unfortunately, part of what makes them so enduring: while far from mute as a designed object – a surface manipulation process called, of all things, a corona treatment makes ink transfer, adherence and, thus, customisation of these bags a breeze – they are tacit responses to a neoliberal culture of individualised ease. They can be populist. They literally cost pennies. They will be there for the taking whenever you need or want. But, as Altman goes on to opine: ‘Most people in most cases have little say over the volume of plastic packaging in their lives.’ In a 2019 BBC interview, Thulin’s son, Raoul, claimed his father’s invention was never intended to be single-use and – devised, as it was, to stem the appalling deforestation rates and exorbitant water consumption necessitated by paper bag production – regarded it ‘bizarre’ that people have individually, and collectively, taken the single-use approach to something so obviously reusable. In the edit, Raoul’s words were extrapolated – mapped onto the proliferation of climate anxiety and, in turn, the power of clickbait – and, now, his claim was that plastic shopping bags were invented to ‘save the planet’. Suddenly, plastic bags were in league with Flubber, the miraculous material substance at the heart of the 1997 film of the same name: created for all possible good but with the distinct potential for world-breaking chaos. I laughed. I am not good for that. But, then, let he who is without single-use sin – he who has bypassed these carriers of individualised fantasies, taking us from the market to the manor, from the cradle to the grave – cast the first stone. I will wait. iconeye.com

Ice breaking Nordic design

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OPINION

Building engagement In terms of early architectural education, Finland can teach the UK a thing or two, explains Fiona MacDonald

ABOVE In Finland, Arkki teaches children creative skills through hands-on architecture projects

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IN FINLAND, ARCHITECTURE holds an important place in school-age education. The subject was put on the after-school curriculum as early as 1993 – the same year that Finnish architecture education organisation, Arkki, was founded. In 2007, the Finnish government made the trailblazing move to place architecture on the national curriculum, as a compulsory subject. Although it has since been moved to sit within the broader arts curriculum, it continues to be highly valued and taught through government-subsidised after-school clubs. This value is no doubt influenced by the groundbreaking work of Arkki, which has led the way in innovating and developing the pedagogy for this teaching for almost 30 years. Arkki’s work demonstrates the joy and importance of learning about architecture: its aim is not to impart a body of factual information, but to pique a confident curiosity in children and young people. What’s more, the Arkki approach shows how direct experience of different types of good design raises awareness and aspirations: it is often through our own sensorial experience that we form views on what we like and dislike, and what we want in our own lives and communities. Arkki’s work actively imparts agency to young people: analytical and communication skills are coupled with activities to promote visual literacy, dexterity and making skills, all with the aim of giving children the right to imagine an alternative future. Collaboration, openended problem solving, exploration and two-way dialogue sit in stark opposition to traditional didactic education. MATT+FIONA, the organisation I founded with architect Matthew Springett in 2016 to involve and empower young people in the built environment, is one of a handful of grassroots organisations that would like to see Finland’s educational approach replicated here in the UK. We see architecture and our built environment as fundamentally intrinsic to the cultural life and discourse of children and young people. Learning through and from the built environment can help children have a voice in how the world around them develops. It can also encourage a built environment that supports our physical and mental wellbeing, education, the health of our economy and environment. As former Arkki director Pihla Meskanen says: ‘Architecture education for young people helps us create a deeper understanding of our surroundings and a demand for a better iconeye.com

IMAGE: JANI LAUKKANEN

FRONT / OPINION

ORIGINAL FOR THE ORIGINALS

Saliscendi - 1957 Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni

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FRONT / OPINION

IMAGE: FRENCH AND TYE

ABOVE For Made in Oakfield (2017), MATT+FIONA worked with young people to design and create their own social shed

environment in the future.’ Already, more than 80% of people in the UK live in urban areas and are affected first hand by the quality of their built surroundings. Typically the built environment, and how it is created and shaped, might have been explored within art and design education in schools. But these subjects are on the sharp decline (the number of Design & Technology GCSEs taken by students decreased by 67% between 2010 and 2020). Meanwhile in 2021, the government quietly revoked its pledge to ‘fund enriching activities for all pupils’ through its new arts fund, a prior commitment to spend £90m a year. So MATT+FIONA is developing an alternative model of architecture education: hands-on ‘Build’ projects. The organisation – built on a pedagogical model similar to Arkki – has now enabled nearly 3,000 young people to design and build their own spaces and places. In 2017, we were invited to support students excluded from mainstream school to design and create their own shed on an allotment in Hull. Fuelled by a UK survey stating that 89% of young people in the UK are never asked what they think of their built environment, we were keen to make no assumptions. Instead of taking the brief as a given, we asked the young people

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what they thought; in place of a house for tools, they called for a place that could act as home for young people living in an institutionalised environment. The project clearly demonstrared the value of trusting young people to know their needs best and to design with social and environmental justice at the core. ‘It was just a great experience to be able to go from the stages of looking at it on paper, to actually then seeing it being built at the allotment,’ said Dan, one of the students involved. ‘A group of 11 young people had come together and just put our designs on paper. You do get a lot out of it.’ Of course good built environment education does not need to actively include co-design. But as Finland shows us, it must be built on the principles of open-ended, learner-led exploration. As the world is facing yet more unprecedented challenges – with, as yet, no known answers – the UK’s obsession with academic attainment, judged through exam grades, seems to completely miss the mark. The case for creativity and confident curiosity has never been stronger. Let’s build! Fiona MacDonald is co-founder of MATT+FIONA. In 2021, the Thornton Education Trust (TET) gave Inspiring Future Generations awards to Arkki and MATT+FIONA iconeye.com

Making places friendly

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WHEN I MOVED from London back to Helsinki some years ago, one thing was clear: I wanted to live within walking distance of the sea. Located on a peninsula and surrounded by the sea from three directions, being in Helsinki just made sense. Here, everyone lives less than 10km from the sea, and it plays a significant role in daily life, from swimming to travelling across the city’s archipelago. The connection to the sea and marine areas is a crucial characteristic and benefit of life in Helsinki, a life that builds on the city’s harbour history. Over the past 15 years, the City of Helsinki has gradually transformed several of its formerly industrial harbour areas into new residential neighbourhoods. Today, we are in the process of turning one of the last remaining city-centre shorelines – Makasiiniranta at South Harbour, which is currently cut off from public access

OPINION

Coastal connection Adapting and opening up urban harbours to contemporary needs is vital to improving resilience and wellbeing, says Hanna Harris

ABOVE Makasiiniranta South Harbour in Helsinki

ABOVE RIGHT Ice swimming at the Helsinki ‘s Löyly sauna

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IMAGES: TIETOA FINLAND, JANNE HIRVONEN / CITY OF HELSINKI – MAIJA ASTIKAINEN

FRONT / OPINION

FRONT / OPINION

by harbour and cruise ship functions – into a cultural hub and pedestrianised urban space. Last May, the City of Helsinki launched a quality and concept competition for this transformation, with the goal to activate and enliven the seafront, create a new public realm for residents and visitors alike and generate long-term sustainable design solutions. Creating green and blue public realms in clever ways is crucial when nurturing the connection between people and the sea. I have seen and experienced the benefits of the sea first hand. Providing uninterrupted access to the seafront enhances people’s wellbeing, offering an uplifting and inclusive space. In addition to this, reshaping and reimagining formerly industrial urban harbours encourages access to other benefits – from better walking and cycling networks to new cultural amenities. The revitalisation of the Makasiiniranta area not only opens up the central stretch Spring 2022

of Helsinki’s shoreline to the public, it also includes plans to establish the new Architecture and Design Museum, which we hope will be a place to take part in shaping the world through the lens of design, contributing to urban life itself. Nine entries have been submitted to the Makasiiniranta transformation competition and a jury will advance a maximum of four proposals for the second phase in March 2022. Ideas and plans put forward include enhancing biodiversity, supporting the city’s climate work and using innovative design and technology to sustainably develop the area. The general public has been very interested in the competition and transformation process – the people of Helsinki feel passionately about the city’s proximity to the sea and how that is reflected in our architecture, town planning and land use. Hundreds of comments were submitted on our online portal about the competition entries;

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the quality of the new public spaces and promenades was seen as particularly important. Cities should be encouraging plans and ideas on how best to design harbours of the future. Yesterday’s harbours may have been spaces of heavy industry, but those of tomorrow are places full of life and innovation. What’s more, adapting harbours to extreme weather and encouraging biodiversity in sustainable ways will only become more prevalent in the years to come. Personally, I will make sure to continue having a daily connection with the shoreline, a key component of Helsinki’s DNA. I will take strolls along the 130km of maritime paths every day, island-hop in the Helsinki archipelago – and soon explore the evolving Makasiiniranta area. Hanna Harris is chief design officer for the City of Helsinki

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FRONT / OPINION

OPINION

Material gain

IMAGE: ÅKE ESON LINDMAN

The future of Sweden’s cement production is on shaky ground. Now is the time to rethink our reliance on concrete for good, writes Anna Graaf

ABOVE White Arkitekter’s timber-framed office building in Gothenburg, Nodi (2021)

Spring 2022

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THE SWEDISH SUPREME Land and Environmental Court ruling in 2021 to reject the mining permit renewal for Sweden’s biggest cement factory, Cementa, was a critical moment when it comes to our reliance on the use of concrete in construction. Cementa is one of Sweden’s single largest emitters of carbon dioxide, but cement production is also responsible for an estimated 8% of carbon emissions globally. This is an alarm bell for the whole built environment industry, that business cannot continue as usual. We must look to and embrace alternative solutions – not just in terms of materials, but in the underlying approach to what we build. To stop mining the earth for raw materials, the fundamental issue is that of consumption. We must reuse and recycle buildings and materials wherever possible, and we must give much deeper consideration to demand: do we really need this new building, do we really require this new space? But it’s also about designing differently: how can you design a building that uses fewer materials and delivers more flexibility, over a greater lifespan? To be able to drastically reduce carbon emissions we need to look at alternative materials, and in particular bio-based and renewable ones. At the same time, we need to take into consideration which of them are easily accessible within a certain geographic location. It’s also imperative to use materials more efficiently and effectively. One debate in the climate discussion in Sweden, for example, is around prioritising the use of timber for high-value applications like buildings, rather than as a biofuel. Research is also underway here at White Arkitekter into reducing waste when it comes to the application of timber in construction – for example, by using the timber by-product as a material for 3D printing. We need to use the right materials in the right place. For example, timber can be lighter and quicker to build with if it is prefabricated. But the effective use of steel for structural reinforcement can, in many cases, drastically reduce the quantities of timber required. And a high-rise timber building can only go ahead with a solid concrete foundation. And so, it becomes about embracing hybrid construction, to economise on materials, while retaining architectural quality and performance. All the above comes to rest on mindset. We need to see new possibilities in new business. Sometimes you need pioneering new buildings – such

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FRONT / OPINION

as Sara Cultural Centre, our carbonnegative tower in Skellefteå, and our timber-framed office building Nodi in Gothenburg – to encourage built environment professionals to see that a new approach is possible. To change behaviour, you need to invest in knowledge; research into more efficient construction methods and materials is something that needs to be stepped up across the industry. At White, for example, we have already developed a new 3D scanning service that makes assessing the potential of reuse in a building more time- and cost-effective. For the architects and practices open to exploring more progressive methods of construction, it is always important Spring 2022

to look at the life-cycle cost of a building, anticipating that timescales may go up when you are doing something new for the first time, and recognising that a project may be more expensive in one phase than another. And to make this transition possible you need buy-in from everyone, from developers to public procurement bodies. In this sense, the ruling on Cementa – which may now see its plant shut down operations – should be treated as a sit-up moment: an opportunity to bring people on to the same page, in the same moment, so we can enter a new mindset on materials in a joined-up way. Anna Graaf is director of sustainability and partner at White Arkitekter 

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ABOVE White’s Sara Cultural Centre (2021) in Skellefteå, one of the world’s tallest timber buildings

Finland welcomes Design Helsinki this summer The capital’s first dedicated B2B contemporary design event will take place 24-25 August

HELSINKI

ABOVE Helsinki’s Amos Rex museum (2018) by JKMM Architects

FINLAND’S CAPITAL HELSINKI is a well-connected and vibrant seaside city with a reputation for producing highquality, conscious design. Renowned for its Nordic architectural innovation, the city also boasts the largest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings in Northern Europe, making it a major centre of architecture. Finnish design and architecture has made its mark on a global scale thanks to the likes of iconic designer Alvar Aalto as well as household-name brands including Artek and Marimekko. Since earning the accolade of World Design Capital in 2012, design has cemented a permanent place as one of Helsinki’s core functions – so it’s no surprise that so many high-profile design showrooms have taken up residency there. Over the past 10 years, Helsinki has become an internationally recognised City of Design, whose experience and expertise are held in high regard. 2022 marks the 10th anniversary since Helsinki was the World Design Capital, and it will suitably celebrate the

IMAGES: MIKA HUISMAN / JEPPE SØRENSEN

PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

LEFT Normann Copenhagen’s Bit Stool range BELOW Marimekko’s Gabriel Näkki blanket

occasion with a series of events and citywide activities, including welcoming the capital’s first dedicated B2B contemporary design event, Design Helsinki. Taking place 24-25 August, Design Helsinki will highlight the profound influence that Nordic design and its commitment to sustainability has on the architecture and design industries, as well as provide a platform for international design professionals to meet with sought-after brands. Featuring an unmissable programme for design, the two-day event will bring the area to life under the summer sun with festivities to match. Immersive installations will line the streets, a curated exhibition will showcase the latest products, delectable food and drink partners will offer a variety of discounts and deals, a topical talks programme will highlight the industry’s most pressing issues, and much more. The fair will celebrate the area’s local design showrooms, which will welcome architects, designers, dealers, retailers and

more through their doors with a jampacked programme of events.  Showrooms Integral to the festival, the local showrooms that partner with Design Helsinki will provide a stimulating programme of events including talks, workshops, product launches and more. The vast range of showrooms dotted around the city-centre provides visitors an opportunity to explore some of the most inspiring design spaces that Helsinki has to offer with distinguished international brands such as Carl Hansen & Søn, Normann Copenhagen and Kvadrat all taking part, alongside major local names including Marimekko, Skanno and Nomart. Participating showrooms include high-end contract furniture brands, technical specialists and material manufacturers, each of which will contribute to a diverse range of activities, led by industry experts. Visitors will be able to attend a variety of showroom-based

events and network in Helsinki’s creative heart. Finnish lifestyle design company Marimekko was founded in 1951 and is famed for its printed fabrics and unique identity. Two of the brand’s Helsinki showrooms will partner with Design Helsinki to showcase its original prints and colours as well as its range of interior products ranging from textiles to tableware. Iconic Danish brand Carl Hansen & Søn has been manufacturing furniture since 1908. With a showroom situated central to the festival map and adjacent to Esplanadi Park, visitors will be able to explore the brand’s latest range of timeless products. Founded in 1946, Skanno hosts highend Italian and French design brands across 700 sq m of showroom space within a neo-Renaissance palace on Erottajankatu 2. Home to more than 40 inspiring brands, visitors can get acquainted with the changing selection of furniture, lamps and materials.

PROMOTIONAL FEATURE

International design pavilion A key feature of the event will be a 1,650 sq m international design pavilion situated in Kasarmitori square in the Kaartinkaupunki district of Helsinki. Kasarmitori has been carefully selected in relation to its location and architectural significance, and provides the perfect destination for visitors to discover leading Nordic and international contract interiors brands. The curated exhibition will present more than 40 brands and hundreds of products covering furniture, lighting, surfaces, architectural finishes and more. Brands confirmed to take part include Aeris, ARKTIS, Framery, Martela, LINTEX, Vaarnii and more.

IMAGES: KRISTA KELTANEN / SUSANNA-LONNROT

Installations and talks programme In addition to partnering with showrooms and presenting international brands, Design Helsinki will host a series of specially commissioned installations, brand activations and a topical talks programme in partnership with Design Museum Helsinki. As part of the live programme, Design in Conversation promises in-depth dialogue with established and new design talent, industry leaders, journalists and institutes, across a two-day programme of talks. Held within the former building of the Brobergska Samskolan high school in Kaarti, Design Museum will partner with the event to curate a comprehensive programme of free-toattend sessions within their auditorium. A special exhibition by design studio FormaFantasma will also be in residence within the museum. Other highlights include: • Helsinki-based architecture office Avarrus Architects will be creating a striking installation next to their practice • Vaarnii in collaboration with Finnish Gin brand Kyrö will be designing a central bar within the international design pavilion • Sustainable brand Durat produces solid surfaces from recycled postindustrial plastics and will build a large pyramid of colour at the entrance to Esplanadi Park • Internationally acclaimed Finnish designer Tapio Anttila will be designing a large-scale glass house installation which will be located on the pedestrianised Keskuskatu, close to Helsinki’s iconic train station

Design Helsinki takes place 24-25 August 2022. For more information visit www.designhelsinki.com

LEFT Designs from Finnish furniture company Martela ABOVE Furniture and interiors from Nomart in Helsinki BELOW Design Museum Helsinki

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Kvadrat Finland Oy, Unioninkatu 18, 00130 Helsinki

FOCUS

IMAGE: ADAM MØRK

Focus

BELOW Ilulissat Icefjord Centre (2021) in Greenland, by Dorte Mandrup

The ICON interview Dorte Mandrup

Feature Remote architecture

Feature Scandi maximalism

Gallery Iceland’s swimming pools

Feature Danish flood resilience

Spring 2022

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FOCUS / INTERVIEW

Dorte Mandrup IMAGE: VOLKER RENNER

The Danish architect’s harmonious designs reflect a Scandinavian sensibility and a belief that you can’t separate beauty from necessity Words by Debika Ray

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IIMAGES: ADAM MØRK

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‘THERE’S NOTHING WRONG with creating an “icon”, but the notion has become superficial, so I hope it begins to gain more depth and meaning,’ says Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, contemplating the idea that the lavish buildings by celebrity architects that were celebrated for much of the 1990s and 2000s have fallen out of fashion in recent years.  The structures that her Copenhagenbased practice has been producing for the past two decades are no less wilfully spectacular – from the sloping Ilulissat Icefjord Centre in Greenland (2021) to the gargantuan thatched extension to the Wadden Sea Centre in Denmark (2017), they are physical embodiments of Mandrup’s aim to create ‘architecture as art and art as architecture’. And these designs are unabashedly authored by the architect: her hand, the firm emphasises, is ‘firmly at the wheel’. Spring 2022

Yet, for all the visual impact of her work, Mandrup talks less about standing out than fitting in – her concerns, she explains, are social and environmental context, sensory and emotional impact, human welfare, research and craftsmanship. ‘We try to concentrate our ideas, to rule out everything that’s not necessary,’ she says. ‘But you can’t separate beauty from necessity.’ The architect believes her approach has a deeply Scandinavian sensibility. ‘Fifteen years ago, I would have said I didn’t feel that involved in the local architecture scene, but the older I get the more I realise I derive from the Scandinavian tradition – its emphasis on function and what’s around a building, the preoccupation with daylight and the humanistic approach, in which architecture is about making a frame around people's lives.’ She credits Denmark’s egalitarian, social-democratic

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THIS AND NEXT SPREAD The Ilulissat Icefjord Centre (2021) in Greenland invites visitors to contemplate the consequences of climate change on the Arctic region

THIS SPREAD Local reeds were used for the roof and facade of the Wadden Sea Centre (2017) on the western coast of Denmark

‘Architecture is about making a frame around people’s lives’

politics for fostering a focus among its designers on communal welfare over individual statements, but she is less keen on what she sees as a cultural aversion in the region to standing out from the crowd, manifested in the often-referenced ‘Law of Jante’ – ‘You are not to think you’re anyone special, or that you’re better than us’ – from author Aksel Sandemose’s 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks.  Mandrup hasn’t let that mantra stand in her way. Since she set up her practice 22 years ago, its projects have expanded in size and ambition, as well as in complexity – both in terms of technical approach to materials and engineering and choice of form, site and subject. She strives to embed her own values and interests even in projects that appear to have less scope for doing so – her design for a new store for Ikea in Copenhagen city centre, for example, will include a public rooftop

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park, while a mixed-use building on the Gothenburg waterfront will aim for ambitious sustainability targets by using timber, and recycling concrete from the previous structure.  The architect draws intensely on the knowledge of experts outside the profession, from geologists to botanists, to generate innovative or unexpected responses to a brief – such as, for example, in the use of local reeds, bound and shaped using traditional craft techniques, for the roof and facade of the Wadden Sea Centre, a gateway to a region of exceptional natural biodiversity. Her designs may be eye-catching but she strives to make them fit harmoniously with their surroundings: The Whale, the upcoming museum about whales she has designed for Norway’s Andøya island, 300km north of the Arctic Circle, comprises a humped form which iconeye.com

IMAGES: ADAM MØRK

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IMAGES: MIR

THIS SPREAD Mandrup’s designs for the Exile Museum Berlin, which will explore the history of people’s displacement

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merges into the landscape and follows the topography of the site.  Mandrup’s blending of research and experimentation with artistic expression and emotional curiosity reflects the route she took to her architectural profession: having grown up in a creative household – with a textile designer mother and engineer father – she first studied sculpture in the United States before returning to Denmark and playing around with the idea of pursuing medicine. She finally settled on architecture for its potential to offer both a creative outlet and a real-world impact. Today, she runs a practice of about 75 people – an ideal size ‘to take on most projects while maintaining independence and integrity’ – with no plans to grow much bigger. While the practice’s projects are still clustered mainly in the Nordic region, recent forays into Germany and the

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Netherlands indicate that it is expanding its reach. When we first meet, in September 2021, Mandrup is presenting one such project to the conference Berlin Questions: her design for a new museum in the German capital devoted to the notion of exile. Located in the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the train station from which about a third of the city’s Jewish population was deported to concentration camps during the Second World War, the museum will take this period of history as its starting point but extend through the ages to shed light on the stories of all the people who have been displaced from their homes since and continue to be today.  Today, only a fragment of the original train station remains: the vaulted entry portal. This will be retained: visitors will pass through it and arrive in a plaza, where they can take a moment to reflect on the history surrounding them

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RIGHT The Whale, an upcoming museum located on Norway’s Andøya island, 300km north of the Arctic Circle

before stepping through the glass facade of the museum beyond. ‘We’re trying to avoid symbolism or intellectualising the notion of exile,’ Mandrup says. ‘Instead, we want to create a sensory experience that allows you to feel, with your body, the uncertainty and the spatial quality of not belonging.’ A grassy roof terrace will offer an additional public space at the end of the journey, which Mandrup strives to include in each of her projects. ‘Architecture has the power to segregate but also to bring people together, and every time we build we are either dividing or opening up,’ she says. ‘We need to be much more careful in how we shape public space, making it inclusive, but not necessarily programming it for a certain functions.’  The architect had the chance to see this impact for herself in October, when she was finally able to visit the Ilulissat Icefjord Centre in western Greenland in its complete and open state. She was struck by how the rooftop vantage point over the seascape of icebergs, which was designed to integrate with the existing public pathway from the town of Ilulissat, and the space underneath that provides shelter from the harsh Arctic climate, were being used. ‘In the afternoon, after the end of the working day, there was suddenly a big crowd of people who had gone out for a walk and ended up there – it is becoming a place for local people, and not just tourists,’ she observes. The project is aimed at communicating the importance of ice and the consequences of climate change. It does so with its architecture, as well as its curatorial programme: the building’s lightness of touch and raised, aerodynamic form – resembling ‘the skeleton of an animal slowly returning to nature’ – was designed to respond to the local winds and the melting of ice below, as well as hinting poetically at the short time for which our species has inhabited the planet. Its curved, cantilevered shape allows the dramatic view to be revealed as visitors move through it. 

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ABOVE The location of The Whale is one of the best places to watch migrating whales, which the museum will celebrate

‘We cannot talk about sustainability without talking about inequality’

When we speak over a video call from Mandrup’s studio in November, she has just returned to Copenhagen after a flurry of travel. While many people have fled cities over the past two years in search of a better quality of life amid the pandemic, the recent crisis for her has been a reminder of the importance of urban spaces, albeit with an argument to rethink them. ‘I don’t think it’s a great idea for everybody to move out to the countryside – to grow their own potatoes and protect their own little realms – but the pandemic has shown us that there is a demand for greater quality in our close neighbourhoods and the value of having friends and family close by,’ she says. ‘With that, I hope there will come an understanding that it pays off to make cities softer and more humanised.’ There are many more lessons to take away from our recent experiences, she

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observes: on the positive end, we have become much better at communicating globally, and the values that her practice holds so dear – the importance of communal space and of living in better harmony with the planet – have become more urgent than ever. On the other hand, it has shone a harsh light on the entrenched problems that we will need to confront and navigate if we are to survive the crises looming ahead of us. ‘It’s clear globally where countries and organisations have failed, and often what these failures have highlighted is the level of inequality around them,’ she says. ‘Along with the climate crisis, this is the biggest crisis we are facing: we cannot talk about sustainability without talking about inequality.’ The egalitarian values that Mandrup has long subscribed to now seem entirely suited to producing the icons of the future. iconeye.com

IMAGE: MIR

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The original

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THIS PAGE Fringe Mountain (2020) by Kristine Mandsberg

Words by Riya Patel

Scandi maximalism

The clean lines of mid-century modernism and its successors are what we have come to associate with Nordic design. But there is another, more colourful, story that is less often told

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THE EARLY 21ST century was defined by the idea that good design must be minimalist. From 1998 it took just nine years for Apple to go from making bulky bubblegum-coloured iMacs to revealing the sleek iPhone – driving a global obsession for the stuff of our lives to be slimmer, smaller and therefore better (at least according to its ruthless marketing). The reductivism at work in technology and product design would come to influence mainstream tastes in furniture too. The slim legs, sharp angles and clean lines of Nordic mid-century design have made it the dominant force in the home interiors market over the last decades. Associations with simplicity and functionality have made design from this region a seemingly unstoppable global force. Now, almost a quarter of the way into the century, it seems we’re feeling about for a new expression. Times are uncertain, and while some tread safe ground in clinging to styles from the past, a new set of Nordic designers is looking to put its own spin on the region’s respected design heritage with a more personal approach. The brand of Scandinavian modernism, exported so successfully around the world since the postwar era, is seen as calm, tasteful and dependable. Craft, quality and reduction to essence are values upheld over clashing patterns, colours and shapes that break the mould. Natural light is prized more than anything in the long dark northern winters, meaning ornamentation and clutter are often avoided. Where Nordic design has historically flirted with maximalism, a once-in-a-generation risk-taker led the way. It took an Austrian, the visionary Josef Frank, to introduce vibrant botanical prints to Swedish interior design firm Svenskt Tenn that railed against puritanical principles and the universality of modernism. Fleeing growing antisemitism in his home country in the 1930s, he saw standardisation and uniformity as threats, beyond interiors to people themselves. In the wake of his influential designs, others in the region took maximalist risks too: Oiva Toikka’s quirky glass accessories for Finnish brand Iittala in the 1950s, Maija Isola’s unmistakable Unikko (Poppy) print for Finnish design house Marimekko from 1964, and the rebellious prints of Swedish 10-Gruppen in the 1970s. Thanks to this lineage, textile and accessory designers in the Nordics seem to have been given more licence to be experimental compared to their furniture-making peers. ‘We’re always outsiders,’ says Danish designer Kristine Mandsberg. ‘We’re not architects or industrial designers. We’re always the ones who apply stuff to other people’s work. For us it’s normal to work with colour, ornament and pattern. I can be more liberal with my work because this is what textile designers do.’ Nevertheless, when Mandsberg went to study at London’s Royal College of Art, surrounded by people ‘from all over the world’, she noticed she had subconsciously absorbed the minimalist aesthetic influence of her home country. ‘I was amazed that where I came from was so obvious in my work,’ she says. Her experience in London led her to a bolder use of colour, seen in interior textile sculptures like

THIS PAGE Mandsberg’s Woven Foam (2019)

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Fringe Mountain (2020), made from shaggy strips of nylon jersey in candy pink and yellow, or Woven Foam (2019), experimenting with vivid purples, oranges and pink. ‘I found out that I could be a maximalist with colour. My way of working with it is quite loud, and that’s not what you’d normally see here in Denmark.’ Danish architect and furniture designer Kevin Hviid is also no stranger to vibrant hues. His Copenhagen-based studio’s brightly coloured designs such as Oli Table (2020) and BOB Bench (2016) play on optical illusions and the radical postmodern designs of Memphis. These statement pieces employ a palette of mirror, tubular steel, brass and fluorescent plexiglass – as well as the more usual wood – to depart from the maxim that form should follow function, and instead explore the graphic qualities of furniture. While Hviid’s style might turn heads among some traditionalists, he has gained national respect for taking Danish craft in a new direction. In 2018 the throne-like Billy Bench was selected for Mindcraft – the Danish Arts Association’s annual showcase at Milan Furniture Fair. Iris, a technicolour swing seat made in collaboration with fashion house Ganni,

BELOW Kevin Hviid’s Memphisinspired BOB Bench (2016) RIGHT Iris (2017), Hviid’s technicolour swing seat created with fashion house Ganni

IMAGES: OPENING SPREAD & PREVIOUS SPREAD – DANIEL SCHRIVER / THIS SPREAD: HANS H BAERHOLM

It seems we’re feeling about for a new expression. Times are uncertain

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was among the experimental designs of the Danish Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition in 2017. Talk of ornament and style in architecture and design is a surefire way to spark a debate. Our aesthetic preferences are subjective, highly personal and also likely to change depending on our age, upbringing and cultural influences. Scandinavia’s brand of minimalism has successfully prevailed for so long because it is unlikely to offend. Danish glassblower and designer Alexander Kirkeby knows his work is divisive. ‘If you want a drinking glass to function and not do anything more than that, then the glasses I make are not for you,’ he says. ‘Mine are tactile. They have distorted shapes, so every time you drink from them you have a different experience. That forces you to really think about the object.’ Kirkeby’s inspirations go back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, with their complex ornamental objects – he loves the level of craft involved and the sense of discovering the minutiae of their details over time. Kirkeby’s process involves repeating the same ornamental element over and over until it becomes distorted. His side tables for Ukurant – a platform

LEFT Ornament above all: Vessel (2020) by Alexander Kirkeby BELOW Kirkeby’s side tables for Ukurant (2021)

‘If you want a drinking glass to function and not do anything more than that, then the glasses I make are not for you.’

IMAGES: SOFIE FLINTH BREDHOLT / KIRSTINE AUTZEN

Alexander Kirkeby

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for experimental Danish design started in 2020 – are based on some Renaissance-era silver tables he’d taken an interest in. ‘I could see [the design of the tables] translate into a technical way of blowing glass with layers of decoration. Layers that are built up slowly and almost melt out.’ The Royal Danish Academy of Art graduate is noticing a more expressive approach to design among his generation, many of whom also exhibited with Ukurant. ‘I think it’s a reaction to decades filled with very strict and geometrical design, especially from Denmark as that’s how the world sees us. But not a reaction against it, like it should be destroyed. Coming from a minimalist approach to design can give us something very unique. There is a lot of aesthetic potential in the combination of the two.’ Many designers and makers who take a maximalist approach have found a home in the design-art scene of independent galleries, rather than traditional manufacturing. Fredrik Paulsen’s highly individual style often has the Swedish designer labelled as an artist, but he is always quick to correct. ‘I always ask to be called a designer because we somehow need to expand the perception of [the role]. I love working with galleries and manufacturers, I don’t see them as polar opposites.’ While the scene for collectible design was growing strong in London around the mid-2000s, it didn’t exist in Scandinavia until much later. Paulsen started the group platform Örnsbergsauktionen in 2012 to have fun, bring people together and infuse Stockholm with the same energy as London’s independent design scene. ‘I moved into this huge studio out of town and wanted to activate it,’ he says. ‘So we did an auction. We had 1,500 people in a 70 sqm space – it was like a nightclub.’ Running for five years, the event became a fixture in Stockholm’s design scene and kickstarted a culture of pop-up shops and small galleries. These are driven by designers taking the initiative to create and show their own work, rather than wait for a collaboration with a manufacturer. Paulsen’s original aesthetic of rainbow colours, paint splatters and raw industrial materials shows more reverence to the DIY punk scene than Swedish modernism. His first loves being skateboarding and clubbing, Paulsen says he never knew about design growing up, and came into it by chance. The outsider stance has helped make his name and introduce new paths for young designers. From his studio he makes furniture on request, like his dyed and waxed pine Mjölkpall stools, as well as limited-edition work, such as with the Copenhagen-based gallery Etage Projects. Soon he will launch Joy, his own line of direct-to-consumer furniture that is flat-packed and customisable by mixing and matching elements. Though Paulsen thinks it is important for designers to continue working with manufacturers for overall progress, he is frustrated by the failure of the furniture industry to keep up with the times. ‘How is it possible for designers to earn a living with a 4-5% royalty?’ he asks. ‘Brands talk about sustainability but a designer would have to create stuff to sell in huge quantities to survive. And so designers need to propose things that appeal to everyone.’

ABOVE Peach Melba Chair (2018) by Fredrik Paulsen RIGHT Paulsen’s multicoloured Mjölkpall stools (2016)

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IMAGES: MIKAEL LAMMGÅRD / LOUISE ENHÖRNING

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THIS PAGE Paulsen’s Prism Collection side table (2016), deconstructed

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The conservatising effects of the system may be one reason minimalism has been in vogue for so long. Paulsen thinks returning to a pre-industrial way of making furniture would be more advantageous for consumer choice, the environment and designers’ livelihoods. ‘If you make personal work that is not aimed at everyone, but a niche, you can sell it in the hundreds not the thousands,’ he says. ‘And you have a real relationship between product and consumer. You are less likely to change the furniture when it doesn’t suit.’ Could the environmental agenda be the thing that turns manufacturers from minimalist please-all designs to shorter, louder and more bespoke runs? Probably not. Although a more responsible attitude to production would be welcome, the world’s associations of Nordic design with craft, quality and timelessness will ensure it stays in high demand. The classics will continue to endure as a shorthand to our collective sense of respect to it. Maximalism remains alive in the hands of a few outsiders. But with a flourishing independent design scene across the Nordics, those contrarians and risk-takers are growing in number. They may come to challenge our view of what design from this region could and should be.

IMAGES: PREVIOUS PAGE – VIKTOR SJÖDIN / THIS PAGE – BUKOWSKIS

BELOW Demountable Chairs (2017) by Fredrik Paulsen

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THIS PAGE Sløjfen (2016), a water-managing public space by Marianne Levinsen

Words by Amy Frearson

Increasing flash floods require that our cities adapt – and fast. In Denmark, landscape architects have been rethinking the urban fabric to work better with water

TOP RIGHT Sankt Kjelds Square and Bryggervangen (2019) by SLA, a network of ‘green rain gardens’ BELOW RIGHT SLA’s Harrestrup Å project will create a wetland park in Copenhagen

THERE WAS A sense of irony when, just days before world leaders were due to gather at the COP26 conference in Glasgow last October to debate solutions for climate change, western Scotland was so badly hit by flooding that cars were left stranded, trains were cancelled and two bridges were washed away. The event followed a year of catastrophic flooding in Europe. In Germany alone, tens of thousands of homes were under water and more than 190 people lost their lives after an extreme July downpour. The country’s worst-hit states experienced what meteorologists described as a month’s worth of rainfall in just two days. Similar stories came out of other countries. In Belgium, the entire city of Liège was told to evacuate. In the Netherlands, the River Maas reached its highest summertime level in over a century. And here in the UK, London experienced its heaviest single-day rainfall since 1983. These floods are no longer freak occurrences; they are part of our everyday reality. The most recent report from the UN’s climate research group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states with confidence that climate change has been steadily increasing the risk of extreme weather events since the 1950s. As we’re currently on course to overshoot 1.5°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels within the next 20 to 30 years, we can only expect this trend to amplify. It has become clear that we can no longer keep the water out; we have to learn how to live with it. You could say it’s a case of sink or swim. But while some countries are barely treading water when it comes to tackling the issue, Denmark is the one that is strokes ahead. In recent years, Copenhagen has opened a series of public spaces designed to manage floodwater, with even more ambitious plans still to come. Other Danish cities and towns have been drawing up equally innovative water management strategies. Planning for floods is not something that necessarily comes naturally to the Danes. Unlike the Netherlands, where around a third of the country sits below sea level, Denmark’s landscape is no more prone to flooding than most. A shift came in July 2011, however, when a torrential rain event in the greater Copenhagen area resulted in £670m worth of damage within two hours. ‘It opened a lot of people’s eyes to this actually being a problem – and a problem that we needed to address in new ways,’ says Kristoffer Holm Pedersen of Danish landscape

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studio SLA, which has been working on several flood-resistant projects in the country.   The general thinking before 2011 was that sewers could be expanded to handle greater volumes of water. But the reality of this ‘cloudburst’, as they call it in Denmark, changed everything. A year later, Copenhagen released its landmark Cloudburst Management Plan, identifying a need for 300 mitigation projects to make the city flood-resilient for the future, along with a pledge to deliver the first 15 of these by 2030. A primarily sewer-based approach was not only insufficient, it stated, but would actually cost the city significantly more. So instead, it was calling for more adaptive and nature-based strategies.  A nature-based approach to flood mitigation – also known as blue-green solutions – involves using natural systems to channel and absorb rainwater while also creating spaces that are designed to flood. It’s about making spaces floodresilient rather than flood-proof, by harnessing the benefits of water rather than simply trying to keep it out. ‘Naturebased design can actually address a lot of other problems we have in our cities, like air pollution, urban heat islands and a lack of biodiversity,’ says Pedersen. Indeed, if a city is going to shell out millions preparing for extreme weather events that only come around so often, why not find solutions that bring other benefits? SLA completed one of Copenhagen’s largest cloudburst response projects to date, Sankt Kjelds Square and Bryggervangen, in 2019. Framing a roundabout in the north of the city, this sequence of spaces features 586 new trees, which are planted to form a network of ‘green rain gardens’ able to absorb large volumes of water. When it’s not raining, pathways offer a green corridor for pedestrians, providing moments of wildlife discovery in what was previously a very urban setting. ‘If we get rid of the asphalt and replace it with permeable surfaces where water can be stored, it can provide irrigation for plants,’ says Pedersen. ‘That gives us these lush environments where we can create meeting places.’ SLA is using similar strategies with projects planned for elsewhere in the city. At Hans Tavsens Park, a sunken basin can provide a retention area for rainwater but function as a sports court the rest of the time, while the Harrestrup Å project will take a green space with a canal running alongside and transform iconeye.com

IMAGES: MIKKEL EYE / SLA

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‘As a landscape architect, you’re always thinking about how to deal with water.’

BELOW Marianne Levinsen reshaped Copenhagen’s Lindevangs Park in 2016 to manage rainwater

it into a biodiverse wetland park. In both projects, which are due to complete in 2024 and 2025 respectively, undulating topography will create natural catchment areas for water. As Pedersen points out, it isn’t enough to just provide green space; it has to have structure. ‘We try not to talk about green as a thing in itself; it’s just a colour,’ he says. ‘A big lawn doesn’t handle the challenges of the new climate; we need topography and we need wild nature.’ One of the biggest challenges of cloudburst events is the speed in which urban spaces fill up with rainwater. In order to cope, schemes usually need a good mix of green and blue strategies – so, both plant-based areas and water-

retention elements. Copenhagen-based landscape architect Marianne Levinsen demonstrated this in her 2016 rework of one of the city’s oldest parks, Lindevangs Park. With a new tilted bowl in the landscape, rainwater is diverted away from the surrounding homes and businesses but some of it is absorbed by a new planting area of reeds, apple trees and blackcurrant bushes. Levinsen and her team also designed an adjoining plaza, Sløjfen, which can contain water both on its surface and in a basin concealed under the paving. Together, the park and plaza could potentially hold up to 700,000 litres of water. Levinsen’s current projects include a scheme for the port city of Helsingør,

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exploring more subtle techniques of flood management. She says there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to water; every site requires a bespoke solution. ‘It’s all about finding the connections,’ she says. ‘Connections between green areas, water, topography, drainage and the condition of the soil, for instance, whether it’s sand or clay.’ What’s key, she explains, is that the various systems all work together, both on a day-to-day basis and during flooding events. Sløjfen features an 84m-long concrete spiral that, during floods, helps to contain the water. But it doubles as a bench seat and a water spout, pumping out filtered rainwater so it can be enjoyed on summer days. ‘As a landscape iconeye.com

IMAGES: CARSTEN INGEMANN / TORBEN PETERSEN

RIGHT A raised concrete water channel at Levinsen’s Sløjfen (2016)

Marianne Levinsen

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THIS PAGE The Sløjfen plaza can contain water both on its surface and in a basin under the paving

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‘Copenhagen may now be the resiliency capital of the world, but it’s super hard getting stuff done.’

IMAGES: FLEMMING RAFN / TREDJE NATUR

Rafn Thomsen

architect, you’re always thinking about how to deal with water,’ she says, ‘but to deal with these big volumes, we have to do new things. Everything has to be thought about in relation to the bigger water infrastructure.’ Despite Copenhagen’s proactive approach, there are some who believe the city could be even further ahead of the curve. Architecture and landscape studio Tredje Natur (Danish for ‘third nature’) has developed an off-the-shelf solution that it believes could be easily rolled out city-wide. First unveiled in 2014, the Climate Tile is a system that can be installed in place of typical paving slabs. Water filters down through tiny holes into an under-surface drainage Spring 2022

channel, where it is directed towards mini planting areas known as urban biotopes. Instead of flowing into the sewage system, where it would become more polluted, rainwater is naturally filtered by soil and plants and released slowly over time. Tredje Natur has been working on a range of flood mitigation projects in Copenhagen. After developing a masterplan in 2012 for the city’s first ‘climate district’ – currently underway in Østerbro, and including SLA’s Sankt Kjelds Square and Bryggervangen – and introducing flood-resilient measures in the neoclassical Enghaveparken in Vesterbro in 2019, founders Flemming Rafn Thomsen and Ole Schrøder became

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LEFT Recreation meets resilience: Tredje Natur’s flood-management measures in Enghaveparken (2019) BELOW Tredje Natur’s permeable Climate Tile in use in Nørrebro

frustrated by the stakeholder politics involved in redesigning streetscapes in the city. ‘Copenhagen may now be the resiliency capital of the world, but, as someone working on these projects on a daily basis, it’s super hard getting stuff done,’ says Thomsen. ‘If you want to take away parking areas or driving lanes, it’s a no go.’ What’s clever about the Climate Tile is that it could potentially be installed during any routine roadworks, so could offer a fast fix for a city with 700km of pavement. Tredje Natur’s research suggests that around 20% of Copenhagen’s streetscapes is superfluous tarmac, so there should be plenty of room to add in the urban biotopes.

THIS PAGE Beyond just the lake, the whole of Enghaveparken has been adapted to be floodable

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‘There are no immediate obstacles in this approach, which is what you need if you want to create a scalable system,’ explains Thomsen. It has been three years since Tredje Natur revealed its first 50m-long stretch of Climate Tile paving, close to its office in Nørrebro, so the architects now have enough data to prove the concept works. With a manufacturer in place, they hope it will soon become ubiquitous. But they aren’t stopping there.  Believing retrofit can only do so much to protect cities against climate change, the studio is involved in a scheme

that would see an artificial island built in Copenhagen’s harbour by 2070. As well as offering city infrastructure for an additional 35,000 people, the 280ha Lynetteholm masterplan includes huge swathes of natural landscape that would function as a massive flood barrier. The project is hugely controversial: many see it as greenwashing what will essentially be a huge piece of city-centre real estate. But Thomsen says he has ‘no doubt’ that it will work effectively as a waterproofing measure, while also offering more social and economic benefits than typical coastal flood defences. ‘Why build a wall,

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when the waves could be absorbed by a landscape?’ he asks. ‘We need to come up with more positive and pragmatic solutions to these dire situations that we are facing.’ With new schemes being unveiled in Denmark all the time, it seems clear that Copenhagen’s nature-based approach to flood management has become the model for this newly flood-averse country. As the full impact of climate change continues to make its mark, this form of urbanism may become the new normal for evolving cities all over the world. iconeye.com

IMAGE: GÆLDENDE

BELOW Designs for the floodbarrier Lynetteholm island in Copenhagen’s harbour

Words by Ellinor Thunberg

THIS PAGE Hlöðuberg Artist’s Studio (2021) in Iceland, by Studio Bua

From Iceland to Norway, building in remote rural spots requires an entirely different way of thinking – and a host of unusual challenges

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IN THE REMOTE fishing and farming area of Skarðsströnd in western Iceland – itself one of the least densely populated countries in the world – you can see abandoned concrete farmhouses located a few kilometres apart like a string of pearls along the coast. Icelandic architect Sigrún Sumarliðadóttir, of Studio Bua, explains how houses traditionally have been left behind here – from the first turf houses to concrete farms that were abandoned in the 1970s, when many locals instead opted for shed-like catalogue homes. Some of the old farms are now being revived, though, and Studio Bua – founded by Sumarliðadóttir with Mark Smyth in 2017 – has completed two projects in the area: Nýp Guesthouse (2019) and Hlöðuberg Artist’s Studio (2021). Both renovations interpret the local architecture, but in a modern and simple way. ‘It is almost like we are stripping it down and continuing with the language of the cultural heritage,’ Sumarliðadóttir says. She has family in the region and has been visiting for many years – which is how the first project brief came about to renovate the Nýp Guesthouse, which also functions as a cultural hub hosting exhibitions, lectures and workshops. The

IMAGES: MARINO THORLACIUS

THIS SPREAD With Hlöðuberg Artist’s Studio, Studio Bua transformed a derelict farm in a remote and rural area

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owners of the now-completed Hlöðuberg Artist’s Studio then visited the transformed guesthouse – and Studio Bua’s second project, to transform a derelict farm into a home and studio, was born. Doing two projects in the same remote area means a lot of shared knowledge has been applied – the same team of builders was used and many of the details were refined the second time around. During winter, the area is characterised by a harsh and unpredictable climate, which dictated the work on site, the materials used as well as the accessibility. ‘The winds are strong, and often we couldn’t reach the area,’ says Sumarliðadóttir. ‘We had to wait a few days and try again.’ She laughs and says that time is an ‘elastic’ concept there. Smyth, who is Irish, didn’t know Skarðsströnd before and with these two projects sees a huge but beautiful contrast to those he does in central London. ‘We really had to be much more flexible in Iceland and go with the flow in terms of what the builders were capable of doing and what we could get there in terms of materials.’ A lot of video chats took place to assist the builders; when the architects could finally visit, they were able to collaborate on small details.

THIS SPREAD Studio Bua’s Nýp Guesthouse (2019), in the same remote Icelandic region

’The winds are strong, and often we couldn’t reach the area.’

IMAGES: GIOVANNI DE ROIA

Sigrún Sumarliðadóttir

Spring 2022

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In the artist’s studio, the old concrete walls are kept barren in addition to the use of Aluzinc – the zinc-aluminium facade material also used in Nýp Guesthouse. ‘Any colour coating would just peel off with the wind and you really have to regularly maintain it, while Aluzinc has been proven to withstand these harsh winds and changes in temperature,’ says Sumarliðadóttir, adding that the material is also very common in the area, used for vernacular homes and sheds. ‘It has this rural industrial feel that we wanted to incorporate and continue working with.’ Extreme climates are regularly a consideration to take into account when designing architecture in remote Nordic areas, and in Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago located 1,300km north of the Arctic circle – that is undoubtedly the case. ‘There’s nothing [there] except for cold and snow,’ says Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, co-founder of architecture firm Snøhetta.

The practice was commissioned in 2017 to build a service building for Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an underground storage facility that preserves seeds from the global crop diversity to provide long-term security of the world’s food supply. Designing a structure to withstand the permafrost in the region was a big challenge. The service building, completed in 2019, stands firmly on heavy steel poles, a solid foundation fixed to the ground. The force when the top layer of the permafrost melts each spring is reportedly as powerful as a river. It was also important to make the building as flat as possible to fit into the (largely protected) landscape without disrupting the scenery. ‘It feels totally remote when you are there because it’s sitting in a very barren landscape,’ Thorsen says. Snøhetta has designed several projects in remote areas of Norway, including its Tverrfjellhytta pavilion at Dovrefjell mountain range, the Bjellandsbu cabin

THIS SPREAD Snøhetta’s 2019 extension of Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault

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near Åkrafjorden, and Tungestølen tourist cabins near Jostedal glacier. But Thorsen points out that even if the locations are remote, the architecture is not. ‘In a way, architecture is always for occupancy once it is done. It’s for the people being there.’ We’re on a Zoom call, but he turns his laptop around for me to see the fjord view from his cabin window near Ålfjorden in western Norway. ‘I enjoy this, it’s very peaceful,’ he says. Being Norwegian, Thorsen has nature close to his heart and knew what to expect in these remote locations – but the briefs were quite different from one project to another. In Dovrefjell National Park in eastern Norway, for instance, the Norwegian Wild Reindeer Foundation wanted a simple cabin where people could wait for the reindeer to show. But Snøhetta – which in fact is named after the park’s famous mountain – developed the idea further. ‘It changed from being a very traditional mountain cabin to something more open towards the landscape and an integrated piece of architecture,’ Thorsen says. Nevertheless, the cabin – built in 2011 – is not insulated and does not have electricity or water. It gives protection against the wind, but also

LEFT Bjellandsbu cabin (2013) by Snøhetta, near Åkrafjorden, Norway, required horses and helicopters to build BELOW The Norwegian Wild Reindeer Centre Pavilion (2011) by Snøhetta, in Dovrefjell

‘The really heavy parts were lifted in by helicopter.’

IMAGES: PREVIOUS SPREAD – TROND ISAKSEN. THIS SPREAD – JAMES SILVERMAN / KETIL JACOBSEN

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen

Spring 2022

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provides a borderline between the accessible and the inaccessible: beyond the glass wall awaits the more untouched areas of the national park, where a deliberate lack of visitor paths seeks to protect nature. The car park for Tverrfjellhytta is 1.5km away from the cabin; a gravel path – which is supposedly wheelchair accessible – leads visitors the rest of the way. But there are some projects even trickier to access. Take the Bjellandsbu cabin (2013), in south-west Norway, where you have to walk or ride on horseback for three hours to get there. The private cabin was first completed down by the fjord, then taken apart and moved up the mountain piece by piece. ‘We had two means of transportation: the primary one up to the site was on the back of a horse because it’s steep – and the really heavy parts were lifted in by helicopter,’ Thorsen says. The horses had to do about 20 rounds, people carried whatever they could – and stones and vegetation were found on site. Both the weather conditions and the landscape influenced the design of the 35 sqm cabin. ‘It had to have a shape where the structure can take 4-5 metres of snow,’ says Thorsen. ‘In winter the cabin usually disappears completely and is buried.’ Maintenance and waste also have to be taken carefully into account. ‘You don’t want any construction waste on these sites,’ says Thorsen. ‘You have to make sure that the material you’re using is in very precise amounts. Transporting things up just to transport them back down would be stupid.’ Another important lesson, he adds, is to reduce the number of different materials to a minimum. ‘If you do wood, do it all in wood – so you can easily repair and exchange elements.’ Another remote cabin project Snøhetta designed, Tungestølen (2019) in western Norway, was commissioned by the local hiking association Luster Turlag and the National Norwegian Trekking Association (DNT). Hiking is a big part of the Norwegian outdoors culture – and hiking cabins are a vital part of this. The DNT operates more than 500 cabins across the country, and anyone can hike to them and stay. The cabin that Tungestølen replaced had been destroyed by a storm, so Snøhetta had to analyse the conditions extremely carefully before building new structures. The team did extensive wind studies to see where to place the buildings in relation to each other, and figured out how to reduce pressure and minimise the risk of the wind’s lifting and cooling effects. ‘You’re developing this kind of strength,’ says Thorsen of the project. ‘Structural strength, mental strength. A feeling of safety and being together around the fire.’ Another remote DNT cabin – this time in Hammerfest, north Norway – was designed by Norwegian practice SPINN Arkitekter in 2018, and was influenced by the conditions on site. ‘The form was inspired by large rocks and boulders strewn around the landscape by glaciers, with a curved form to help them survive strong winds,’ says architect James Dodson. The idea was that the local DNT group would build the structure, which affected the approach. ‘We had to make something that was a

THIS SPREAD Tungestølen (2019), a set of remote hiking cabins in in western Norway by Snøhetta

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kit of parts, with clear instructions on how to put it all together.’ He says one of the major goals was to create a hiking destination, but also to improve health and encourage people to get out in nature. This connection with nature is the essence of Norwegian hiking culture, and is matched by a desire to preserve the outdoors. Snøhetta’s Thorsen recommends being careful when considering how far into remote nature to go; by romanticising the beauty, we can end up spoiling it through our presence. ‘You should thoroughly investigate the relevance of buildings,’ he says, ‘to make sure that the location is correct. That this is a place where we actually want people to be in.’ On the other hand, he adds, architecture can also perhaps help preserve nature. ‘Maybe by cultivating a particular spot we can reduce or organise the number of visitors. It’s a more careful use of the landscape.’ My thoughts circle back to the clearly defined borderline, the glass wall in Tverrfjellhytta. Beyond a certain point the landscape takes over and sets the rules. Or as Thorsen puts it: ‘Beyond that glass it’s only for the animals and only for nature on its own terms. Nature for nature.’

BELOW SPINN Arkitekter’s 2018 mountaintop cabin for the National Norwegian Trekking Association

IMAGE: TOR EVEN MATHISEN

By romanticising the beauty [of nature], we can end up spoiling it through our presence

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Pools in Iceland WHEN THE PANDEMIC hit in 2020, Reykjavík-based photographer Bragi Þór Jósefsson began photographing Iceland’s outdoor swimming pools with a drone. The pools – in all different shapes and sizes – are a mainstay of Icelandic leisure culture (‘an Icelandic town without a swimming pool is not considered a real town,’ the photographer says). But during lockdowns, these hubs of play and exercise became eerily quiet, emptied of people, turning into strange extensions Spring 2022

or interruptions of the rugged landscapes Iceland is known for. Bragi Þór Jósefsson continued his project past lockdowns, documenting as many of these publicly owned outdoor pools in the country that he could. Last year, he crowdsourced and released a book showcasing them: 100 Outdoor Swimming Pools. From concrete urban neighbourhoods to windswept coastal spots, these bursts of turquoise turn up everywhere across Iceland. Here are seven of our favourites.

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BELOW Trophy (2019), an upcycled furniture collection by Flétta

Feature Designing with food waste

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Waste not From oyster shells to orange peel, food waste could be the design material of the future

RIGHT The Gigas stool, by Carolina Härdh, is made from oyster shells, fish glue, algae and rice starch

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biodegradable as well as having an aesthetic value and strength.’ She experimented with, among other things, coffee grounds, eggshells and paper, turning the resultant material into beautiful sculptures. Härdh was provoked by the lack of sustainability in the field and was also searching for new ways when she turned to food waste. ‘I was in a restaurant having oysters and got curious… The shells are so beautiful, like a keepsake, so I asked what they do with them after, and if I could bring mine home,’ she says. When she learned that restaurants just throw away the oyster shells, she started reaching out – but most establishments were reluctant to share their waste. ‘It was hard for me to get access, but I finally found restaurants willing to share,’ she says. After Höcks and Härdh met in 2019 at a master’s programme at HDK-Valand, the Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, they started experimenting with oyster shells and Besitt (2020) is the result of their efforts and collaborative work. Today it sits so naturally, a beautiful and poetic piece

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ABOVE Designers Carolina Härdh and Emeli Höcks use waste oyster shells collected from restaurants RIGHT Härdh and Höcks rest on their bench, Besitt (2020)

IMAGES: CAROLINA HÄRDH / CAROLINA LINGH

‘CAN I TRY IT?’ I ask, peering down at a curious handmade bench. The answer, from designers Carolina Härdh and Emeli Höcks, is yes, of course. I sit down carefully but soon realise there’s no need for extra caution: the bench, Besitt, is both sturdy and strong – with a core of heavy-duty cardboard pipes, reinforced by a single piece of wood. But it’s the exterior that is truly fascinating: although the bench appears to be made from limestone, it is in fact a biomaterial made from oyster shells, paper, bone glue and potato starch. We’re at the Nordic-Japanese restaurant VRÅ in Gothenburg, Sweden, where Härdh and Höcks are due to give a talk – and have brought along their creation. The duo have been designing with food waste for several years, both individually and as a team. Höcks recalls experimenting for weeks with different recipes in her kitchen: ‘My interest started when I did my bachelor’s degree, and I thought it was hard to find a good way of working as a design student. I decided to develop my own material based on certain criteria, such as it being local, non-toxic and

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IMAGE: TANIA MALRÉCHAUFFÉ

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LEFT Caracara collective’s lampshades made from family biowaste ABOVE The biowaste used to create the lampshades, including orange peel and garden waste

‘We have endless amounts of material just from going to the supermarket.’ Aleksi Puustinen Spring 2022

of furniture making use of something that would otherwise have been thrown away. But the road to getting here was, well, messy. The designers collected waste bags of oyster shells from restaurants and cleaned them in Härdh’s bathtub. The shells were later crushed manually – hammers turned out to be difficult, but a steel pole worked better, like mashing the ingredients for a mojito. Not your average mojito, of course – one that smells of the sea, with a side of oyster-shell chips everywhere. ‘We felt really embarrassed about the mess and the smell of seaweed and ocean,’ says Härdh. ‘In our second year of the master’s programme we got our own room.’ Luckily, the finished product is smellfree and right now the duo is working on objects for the restaurant Bulot by Emil Bjelke and Gabriel Melim Andersson, opening in Gothenburg in April 2022. Höcks and Härdh are secretive about what exactly it is that they are creating, but oyster shells will be involved. They both feel that food waste design

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has gained more recognition in recent years and that a sustainable and more circular design scene is a must going forward. ‘We have no other choice; we are not reaching the sustainability goals as it is now, and if we are to do that within a few years we need to be more circular,’ says Härdh. They are not alone in thinking this, or in turning to food waste as a design material. In Finland, Caracara collective, founded by designers Aleksi Vesaluoma and Aleksi Puustinen, works with orange peel, among other materials. ‘Almost every grocery store in Helsinki has a fresh juice machine these days so we have endless amounts of material just from going to the supermarket,’ says Puustinen. ‘They happily give it away and it’s free.’ It takes around 20 squeezed oranges to create one of Caracara’s lampshades, but the material can take different forms. ‘It’s super versatile: you can shape it by hand, press it into a mould or make sheets which you can laser cut,’ Puustinen says. ‘One lesson we have learned is that if something doesn’t

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seem to work, just try again with different methods and you will get a nice outcome eventually.’ In order to avoid potential rot or mould, peel products are coated with a vegetable wax and oil combination – mainly carnauba wax and linseed oil, to protect against moisture. Nevertheless, despite many wins, it has been difficult to achieve durability, strength and water resistance, which means the material is still more for indoor use than outdoor, and there are limitations. ‘You could spray a thick layer of lacquer on top, but that would lose the original idea of making something organic,’ says Puustinen. ‘We have been avoiding that, but it obviously limits the kind of products we can create and that’s why we have been doing lampshades and things that are not so much under load or handled a lot. We’re still working on this; it’s a long process.’ They have both seen the field of food waste design and broader biodesign gain recognition in recent years. ‘It’s great to see that there are even new courses being established at universities,’ says

Vesaluoma, referring to initiatives like the multidisciplinary CHEMARTS programme at Aalto University in Finland and the Biodesign MA at Central Saint Martins in London. ‘It has become a trend now.’ With around 88 million tonnes of food wasted in the EU annually, it is clear that something needs to be done. And although circular design alone can’t fix the problem, it can at least help make use of our leftovers. Collaboration is needed, and Vesaluoma is hoping for a future where the knowledge is shared not only among designers and makers, but big corporations too. ‘I would like this to move in a direction where there’s more of an open book about these materials, to let people build upon each other’s experiences and knowledge and come up with better solutions together,’ he says. ‘These materials still need a lot of research and development to make them more durable, and to be able to be used on a bigger scale. But with enough focus and resources going into the right things… I think we can get there.’

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ABOVE Using waste orange peel roasted (left) or raw (right) creates different colours in the resultant lampshades

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Flétta IMAGE: SUNNA BEN

A decision to explore local waste material streams led an Icelandic studio to some new design discoveries Spring 2022

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THIS PAGE Jólakötturinn (the Icelandic Yule Cat), created from discarded clothes (2020) OPPOSITE PAGE Rugs made of denim strips from old jeans (2019)

the studio wrapped bundles of discarded children’s clothes into new spindly catlike forms, as a reference to the folkloric character Jólakötturinn (the Icelandic Yule Cat). While plenty of designers have applied inventiveness to the glut of textile waste, Flétta’s more thought-provoking works tackle objects in recognisable form. Sports trophies and airbags are not top of the list when it comes to items causing the global waste crisis, but they’ve both made interesting source material for the studio’s projects. ‘We’d see trophies in second-hand stores and wonder where they would eventually end up. They are made of a few different materials, and their composition is very complicated,

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IMAGES: SUNNA BEN FOR RAMMAGERÐIN / SAGA SIGURÐARDÓTTIR

THE GENESIS OF Icelandic design studio Flétta was not a product, but a map. In 2014, founders Birta Rós Brynjólfsdóttir and Hrefna Sigurðardóttir set out to research where waste materials from local industries end up. They proposed that, instead of going to landfill, incineration or recycling, resources such as wood pallets, textiles and metal offcuts could form a catalogue of cheap materials for designers and makers to work with. ‘In Iceland we import almost everything and export it again for recycling. It’s important we make something out of waste here rather than dumping it somewhere else,’ says Sigurðardóttir. Insights from the project eventually led them to set up their own studio in 2018. ‘We started an experiment to provide creatives with materials, but we saw so much waste that we felt we just had to start utilising it ourselves.’ The pair, who met while studying product design at Iceland’s University of the Arts, have formed a rigorous approach to the type of project they want to undertake. Brynjólfsdóttir says: ‘We ask: “Is it better to take this material out of its stream? Or does it already have a good outcome?” There’s an abundance of textiles going to waste, for example. But we really try to pick out the ones that have no possibility other than shredding.’ In textile work, the studio takes an individualised and handmade approach with unique results. In 2019, the designers made strips of denim from old damaged jeans collected by the Red Cross, turning them into a rug collection with fashion designer Steinunn Eyja Halldórsdóttir. A year later, Flétta turned again to waste collected by the Red Cross that was deemed unfeasible to recycle or reuse; working on a limited-edition project for national craft platform Rammagerðin,

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LEFT Trophy (2019), a collection of furniture items made using old and unwanted trophies

IMAGES: SAGA SIGURÐARDÓTTIR

BELOW Flétta founders Birta Rós Brynjólfsdóttir (left) and Hrefna Sigurðardóttir (right)

so a regular consumer would never take the time to take them apart for recycling,’ says Brynjólfsdóttir. ‘We’ve tried to find a different path for them, making them more valuable by redesigning.’ Started in 2019, Trophy is a collection of furniture made from gaudy metal cups, marble plinths and sporting figurines. The unwanted prizes are taken apart and recomposed by hand into lighting products, pedestal tables and shelves. In their new functional context, the trophies appear trivial, leading us to think about what we truly value over time. The output of the ongoing collection is as diverse as its source material. As well as browsing charity shops for trophies, local sports clubs turn up at the studio door to donate bags of them that have never collected by their winners. Last year, Reykjavik-based lifestyle brand FÓLK put the studio in touch with a dealer of used car parts. Researching its inventory, the pair found airbags to be a good candidate for transformation. They are unable to be reused for safety reasons, and are made of composite metal and plastic that makes them difficult to recycle. Flétta saw a use for them as large seat cushions, cleaning them up and transforming them into a product for FÓLK with minimal intervention. ‘When we take an object that already was something, we like to leave most of the story behind,’ says Brynjólfsdóttir. By leaving visible traces of these products’ previous lives, the designers hope they serve object lessons for the consumer, asking them to be more critical about the products they accept. For designers, they are a call to be more questioning of material choices and production methods. ‘It was a bit of a shock studying product design and realising decisions were made in the past that we have to live Spring 2022

‘In Iceland we import almost everything and export it again for recycling. It’s important we make something out of waste here rather than dumping it somewhere else.’ Hrefna Sigurðardóttir

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RIGHT Cushions made from old airbags, for FÓLK (2021)

The studio sees an opportunity to radically reshape the product designer’s palette in a future with limited resources

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IMAGE: SUNDAY & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY

with,’ says Brynjólfsdóttir. ‘A lot of our projects are also stories about how we manufacture, where materials come from, what kind of things we use and how they are put together.’ Some brands invite designers to make collectible editions from their waste materials – as Hermès has done with its leather offcuts under the label Petit h since 2010. But Flétta has elected to seek out less obvious streams of waste. Mineral wool insulation is the focus of its latest research, in collaboration with product designer Kristín Sigurðardóttir. The building material, usually made from spun mineral fibres, often goes to waste after a building is demolished or refurbished. The designers have an idea to make a type of location-specific glass from it, working with Steinull, an insulation manufacturer that sources all its raw materials close to its factory. Deriving your own materials has its challenges, but through its research and craft the studio sees an opportunity to radically reshape the product designer’s palette in a future with limited resources. While making limited-edition furniture and objects from waste won’t solve the crisis at large, the studio thinks its collaborative attitude to exploring waste streams and engaging with industry will inspire more designers to look beyond the usual materials. There are creative advantages to working from unusual start points too. ‘It’s exciting to try and deal with today’s challenges. And to work with constraints,’ says Sigurðardóttir. ‘Our rules are: you have to fully utilise the material; you have to use something that already exists; and use as little energy or resources as possible. Then you have a frame to work within. And it’s a really nice way to shape a project.’

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Pierpaolo Ferrari, 2021

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Intimate fashion Words by Allyssia Alleyne

A future-focused exhibition at Helsinki’s Design Museum showcases a new generation of Finnish fashion innovators

RIGHT Ervin Latimer’s fashion brand, Latimmier

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GONE ARE THE days when Finnish fashion could be summed up with bolts of Marimekko prints: a new wave of young, forward-thinking designers has emerged to put Helsinki on the map of the fashion circuit. Champions for ingenuity, sustainability and radical individuality, they’re consistently represented at prestigious competitions – and often walk away with top honours.  Much of the credit goes to the highly selective fashion department at Aalto University – located just outside the Finnish capital – which has, in the last 15 years, developed a reputation as an incubator for world-class design talent. The school’s annual fashion showcase, Näytös, attracts recruiters from international design houses; its researchers, meanwhile, have helped pioneer sustainable textiles and wearable tech. A number of former graduates are among the 40 designers included in Intimacy, a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Finnish fashion scene on show at the Design Museum in Helsinki until 13 March 2022. Curated by Annamari Vänskä, professor of fashion research at Aalto, the exhibition explores the close relationship between clothing and the body, and how local designers are disrupting norms around how clothes are constructed, worn and consumed. The overall impression is of a selfassured design scene, firm in its values and eager to experiment.  ‘I think we're getting a newfound confidence,’ says Ervin Latimer, founder of the masculine-leaning luxury brand Latimmier, of his contemporaries. ‘[As Finns] we often kind of look down on ourselves because our Nordic neighbours are ahead in many things. But I think we’re slowly realising that actually, maybe we’re the cool kids who have more artsy, special things going on.’  ICON spoke to three of the designers on show at Intimacy about sustainability, creativity and casting aside fashion industry conventions.

THIS SPREAD Designs from Rolf Ekroth’s spring/summer 2022 collection

Rolf Ekroth’s route into fashion was circuitous. It was only after years spent studying psychology and social work, selling appliances at hardware stores and playing professional poker, that he even considered clothes could be his calling. ‘When I figured out that I maybe wasn’t a good enough person to be a social worker, I found poker; and when I realised that I’m not a bad enough person to be a poker player, I found a middle ground in fashion,’ jokes Ekroth, who graduated from Aalto in 2015. ‘But I’ve always loved design, even before I thought it could be a realistic career for me. I loved the feeling you get when you put on a new garment that makes you feel like a better version of yourself.’  Part of that feeling comes from the sensual and aesthetic qualities of his garments – sturdy and elegant sportswear made from technical fabrics, infused, increasingly, with notes of Finnishness.

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IMAGES: OTTO VIRTANEN

Rolf Ekroth 

Prints have been inspired by himmeli (traditional straw mobiles); garments are embellished with cascades of metal pins embossed with regional wildflowers. The materials themselves prioritise sustainability, too: Ekroth estimates that 85-90% of the textiles he uses comprise either recycled materials or stock fabrics left over from previous seasons. For spring/summer 2022, he centred his Finnish Midsummer-themed collection around Bio2, a fibre made from straw leftover from agriculture by Finnish energy company Fortum.  While Ekroth says he’s always aware of the industry’s massive carbon footprint, the pandemic gave him the space to realise how even as a small brand, he could be doing more to stem the problem. ‘I’ve always thought that the polluting effect of fashion was more [down to] fast fashion,’ he says. ‘But I want to take myself out of the comfort zone of thinking that because my brand is small, I can do whatever I want. I want to take responsibility for all of the choices I make.’

ABOVE Ekroth has made references to Finnish culture in his s/s 2022 collection, including himmeli (traditional straw mobiles) and pins embossed with regional wildflowers

‘I loved the feeling you get when you put on a new garment that makes you feel like a better version of yourself.’ Rolf Ekroth

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IMAGE: OTTO VIRTANEN

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THIS SPREAD Latimer's luxury clothing brand explores ‘the performance of masculinity'

‘Fashion shouldn’t really limit us, but should actually kind of free us to present ourselves in the way that we want to.ʼ Ervin Latimer

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IMAGES: HAYLEY LÊ

‘For me as a designer, finding the meaning behind the design has always been important,’ says Ervin Latimer. ‘It’s not just the silhouette, or the print, or the colour or whatever, but also what it stands for: in addition to sustainable practices and [ecologically friendly] materials, you need purpose to justify an existence.’  It’s with this in mind that Latimer, who was named Finland’s Young Designer of the Year in 2020, started his own brand, Latimmier, in summer 2021. The brand is a luxe refutation of gendered rules around clothing and representation, providing building blocks for ‘the performance of masculinity’ rather than menswear. Conservative shirting, tailoring and heavy knitwear are subverted; dresses and skirts are given new context. Each look is designed to flatter a range of body shapes, whether through adjustable components or clever cuts.  Latimer traces the genesis of the brand to his own experiences as a drag performer and member of Finland’s ballroom scene. (During Helsinki Pride 2019, he hosted the city’s first club night aimed at queer people of colour.) ‘There’s that idea of, “Hey, we can actually have fun with this. We don't need to care if it’s men’s or women’s. We can choose what we want to perform,”’ he says. ‘I think the number one thing is to help people to realise that fashion shouldn’t really limit us, but should actually kind of free us to present ourselves in the way that we want to.’ When we speak in December, the Latimmier team is working toward the brand’s official launch in January 2022, and as a business owner, Latimer is as conscientious about the internal culture he’s creating as the designs themselves. Social sustainability, he says, is an ingrained priority. To avoid burnout, employees only work four days a week. Diversity is also a constant talking point, both in terms of creative output and decision-making behind the scenes.  For Latimer, his brand is an opportunity to imagine new models beyond the profit-first, peoplesecond approach that many take for granted. ‘[The industry] seems to forget that there’s that human side as well that we should consider,’ he says. ‘We will find the right pace that works for us when it comes to making meaningful designs and meaningful things.’

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Anna Isoniemi does not do ‘subtle’. Her debut collection – which was shortlisted for the Hyères International Festival’s womenswear prize in 2018 – was a rainbow procession of head-to-toe sequinned looks inspired by racing car drivers and 1960s notions of the future, while her 1970s-inspired follow-up saw Lurex suit jackets, knitted tops, and dresses of metal mesh printed with oversized polka dots. A buzzy 2020 collaboration with Adidas was similarly ostentatious, with sequinned tracksuits, maxi dresses and jerseys marked with the brand’s signature trio of stripes. ‘I would describe myself as a loud minimalist,’ says Isoniemi. ‘I like to balance opulence and scarcity in my work, and I also want to create something wild, but at the same time really controlled.’  But if Isoniemi designs clothes that beg for attention, she seems less fussed about where exactly that transaction happens. She considers even the shiniest, most diaphanous, most unusual of her garments as ‘everyday wear’. To be any more prescriptive would be not only restrictive, but retrograde. ‘You can’t just say that this is evening wear and that is sportswear; you can wear everything you own in the streets, or at home, or to a party,’ she says. ‘I think it’s very important that the consumer decides where they want to wear the clothes.’ This idea is at the heart of Isoniemi’s brand, and ties into a larger vision she has about the relationship between her role as a designer and her relationship with those who wear her clothes. The daughter of a textile designer mother (‘I have been printing since I was six’), she learned early on the potential of pattern and fashion as a storytelling tool. But she also acknowledges that being a designer means opening those stories up to endless revisions.  ‘I think there’s a really interesting [conversation] between the designer and the people who wear the garments… This is quite philosophical, but it’s almost like giving a feeling, or something of yourself, to another person,’ she says. ‘I think there is something very intimate about that.’

ABOVE Isoniemi embraces a maximalist aesthetic with her use of colours and materials such as sequins

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IMAGES: COURTESY OF ANNA ISONIEMI

Anna Isoniemi

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Words by Francesca Perry

Simon Skinner Stockholm’s rising industrial designer builds on his Afro-Caribbean heritage to tell a broader story of Swedishness Spring 2022

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LEFT Collaborating with RISE (Sweden’s research institute), Skinner created experimental objects using 3D-printed sand BELOW Afropicks (2019), a range of eight afro combs inspired by people Skinner interviewed

30-YEAR-OLD SWEDISH designer Simon Skinner is challenging what Swedish design means, and who it represents. The Stockholm-based creative is trained in industrial design – with projects ranging from lighting and benches to sculptural explorations – and has risen to prominence internationally with his Afropicks project, a range of afro combs in bold graphic forms, for which the designer was shortlisted in the 2020 Wallpaper* Design Awards. The collection of eight unique picks – launched in 2019 and produced using laser-cutting, casting and 3D printing – celebrates the plurality and diversity of Black and mixed-race identity in Sweden. As part of the project, Skinner interviewed eight different people with African heritage about their lives and perspectives on what it means to be Swedish; each comb is named after and inspired by an interviewee. Skinner’s own Afro-Caribbean heritage served as a point of reference in his 2020 design for a cabinet, which is decorated with flame-like embellishments celebrating patterns seen in the annual Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Much like the Afropicks range, the cabinet – which blends wood and acrylic offcuts in a form that seemingly defies gravity – is both a stylish utilitarian product and a narrative-infused creation investigating, in Skinner’s words, ‘mixedness’. I spoke to the designer in November about his route into design, his work’s ambitions and what’s next. Spring 2022

When and how did you realise you wanted to be a designer? I didn’t realise that a career as a designer was possible when I grew up, and didn’t have any immediate role models or inspirations that had taken that path. But I’ve always been curious about the way different objectives and environments coexist. I think a lot of my early explorations can be attributed to my restlessness. Before art school, my creative outlet was through graffiti and just weird stuff that I built at home. I wasn’t very attentive in high school and at one point started to draw endless variations of lamps on a piece of paper. Ideas started coming from nowhere and it was sensational to transform materials and shapes into tangible constructions. It was my best friend’s uncle who told me that a career doing just that was in fact possible, and guided me to Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design [in Stockholm] – which is where I was given the foundations that solidified my curiosities. What would you say are the aims or objectives behind your work? If the visual language is a force with the power to reconstruct perceptions of reality, then that is the objective behind my work. Having grown up in a multicultural environment, I developed a heightened awareness which directly contributed to my curiosity towards different class systems and their effect on people. How are these systems structured? Is it possible

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LEFT Flame patterns on Skinner’s cabinet piece (2020) reference the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival BELOW Soul Cell, sculptures created with 3D-printed sand

‘I would say that Swedish design is under development, and inevitably so. It cannot continue to stay stifled’ to transcend them – and what could that look like? Those are questions that influence my process today. With that in mind, I use design to investigate social codes and symbols in society with the objective to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning they carry. The Afropicks project started with an interrogation of ‘Swedishness’. How does your work seek to counter assumptions about Swedish design? Afropicks allowed me to give multicultural perspectives an outlet through an object that carries deep historical roots and heritage. The object, an afro comb, has a standard design which historically has been a symbol for Black pride and power. I wanted to create a collection that encapsulated the comb’s symbolism whilst also channelling stories of in-betweenness and fluidity. In the eight-piece collection I explore shapes, materials and colours, which through the process came to Spring 2022

symbolise ‘mixedness’, whilst elevating the traditional comb design. Behind each comb is a story and behind each story is a person. By giving these stories an outlet, it also aspires to challenge narrow perspectives of what Swedishness and Swedish design is. I would say that Swedish design is under development, and inevitably so. It cannot continue to stay stifled – right now it’s not inclusive of how Swedish society actually is. It needs to adapt to the experiences that it’s made up of – just like an afro comb can bear the meaning of the people that use it.  Your cabinet piece pulls in references to your Caribbean heritage. Can you tell us more about it? Historically the cabinet is a piece of furniture that symbolises high status. Looking at both traditional and modern styles that are applied in exclusive cabinets, I wanted to play with new references and manufacturing techniques. Influenced

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‘I want to create objects with meaning, which form a connection to their owner that can carry on over time’ by Scandinavian design, street culture and the annual Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, this became a style and material investigation bound to mixedness. I combined wood with offcuts from acrylic sheets. I realised that the decor was removable, which made it possible for anyone to add their own pattern beneath the frosted acrylic, using only pen and paper. In the future this approach is going to be conventional, and conventional is often synonymous with class. Imagine someone looking at this cabinet 50 years from now, finding themselves represented in history. How do you address environmental sustainability in your work? I approach environmental sustainability with quality and smallscale production. I want to create objects with meaning, which form a connection to their owner that can carry on over time. If you manage to secure that connection, then I believe you can

create a more sustainable design and production ecosystem.  So you’re not so interested in mass production? So far, my furniture objects have been the result of creative experiments, not necessarily made for mass production. I’ve had a playful approach to these designs which is a trait that I try to embed in my work. Doing such projects once in a while helps to keep my curiosity alive.  What’s next for you? I'm currently working on two very exciting projects. One is the launch of a new collection of afro combs that will be presented within a context that deserves to be celebrated. The other is a collaboration that aims to understand and shine a light on perspectives in a group that’s almost completely underrepresented in society.

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Risom Lounge Chair Jens Risom’s enduring design caught America at a moment of change Words by Lemma Shehadi

THE NOW ICONIC lounge chair by Danish designer Jens Risom for US manufacturer Knoll combines the austere simplicity of Nordic woodwork, America’s growing sensibility towards European modernism and the material shortages of the Second World War. Produced initially in 1943, its curved frame was made of a single piece of carved maple, with the seat created from discarded parachute webbing, left over from textile factories that had redirected their production to support the war effort. 

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IMAGES: FORM ARCHIVE/JENS RISOM

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This early example of upcycling grew out of a short-lived but hugely successful partnership between Risom and the German furniture salesman Hans Knoll, two young immigrants to the US who ultimately shaped contemporary American design in their search for new opportunities. Their brief collaboration is outlined in the new monograph Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table (Phaidon, 2022) by Vicky Lowry, who credits Risom for ‘introduc[ing] generations of Americans to contemporary wood furniture with a clean-lined Scandinavian spirit’. War, material shortages and a road trip across America to promote drawings of possible furniture led to a foundational collection that shaped both men’s careers. ‘We drove around the country… and stopped wherever there were people who’d liked our things,’ Risom told New York Magazine in 2015. ‘I don’t think we had a catalogue or anything – this was very primitive. We had drawings of things we had done.’ Risom arrived in New York in 1939, and soon found opportunities for the wooden furniture designs he had begun to develop as a student in Denmark. The demand for European furniture and textiles had grown, as Americans emerged from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Early iterations of the lounge chair were drawn in these years, when Risom worked as a freelance designer in New York for the Danish firm Georg Jensen, among others. Risom’s archive reveals drawings for an unrealised armchair with curved seating, and furniture designs for small New York apartments. Risom and Knoll first met when Knoll was selling furniture imported from his father’s factory in Germany. But when the war broke out in Europe, Knoll began to manufacture his own furniture in the US – and commissioned Risom. In 1941, after a string of successful collaborations, the pair embarked on their famed road trip. There, they met with architects and potential clients, and Knoll promoted his furniture with Risom’s designs. ‘Their skill sets were perfectly aligned,’ writes Lowry. ‘A salesman at heart and consummate networker, Knoll secured the clientele […] while Risom, the artistic perfectionist, handled the design work.’ Upon their return to New York, Knoll and Risom prepared the launch of their first collection. But after the attack on Pearl Harbour that year, the United States entered the war. Materials became scarce, and factories were directed to support Spring 2022

Risom arrived in New York in 1939, and soon found opportunities for the wooden furniture designs he had begun to develop as a student in Denmark

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LEFT Risom’s Model 654 Lounge Chair, for Knoll, 1943 ABOVE Risom in 1939

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the war. Risom thrived from this limited supply, creating simple and affordable furniture with discarded or low-priority materials. ‘We found that all webbing for parachutes had to be tested very rigidly… an enormous percentage did not meet the specifications, so there was discarded webbing we could buy very cheaply and as much as we wanted,’ said Risom in Fifty Something – And Before (1994), a short film by the designer. In 1943, they launched Risom’s hugely successful 650 Line, which included the lounge chair. The collection of five chairs and two sofas was versatile: available with or without arms, in single or double width, and with the choice of fabrics like ‘non-priority’ leather or the parachute webbing. ‘Architects and interior designers who embraced modernism found great appeal in Risom’s pieces, with their clean-cut good

looks, Scandinavian flavour and nod to traditional craft,’ writes Lowry. But the partnership wouldn’t last. That same year, Risom was drafted into the army. Upon his return at the end of the war, Knoll had hired Florence Schust, a former student of Mies van der Rohe, who helped turn the company into an international powerhouse. According to Lowry, Schust dismissed Risom’s designs as ‘too romantic […] They were Scandinavian.’ Yet the lounge chair remains one of Knoll’s signature pieces, and Risom is remembered as the ‘first true Knoll designer’ in the company’s archive. Risom went on to set up his own successful furniture company in 1946, Jens Risom Design (JRD), achieving global fame. ‘He had finally made the decisive move to have everything he designed under his control,’ writes Lowry.  

‘There was discarded webbing we could buy very cheaply and as much as we wanted.’ Jens Risom

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LEFT Diary pages from Risom’s US road trip with Hans Knoll, 1941 BELOW The Risom Lounge Chair, 1942

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture

Project Dance House Helsinki by JKMM

Feature Clean construction in Oslo Architecture icon Toppila Silo by Alvar Aalto

IMAGE: TUOMAS UUSHEIMO

Q&A Joar Nango

BELOW Dance House Helsinki by JKMM

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Words by Lee Marable

The Finnish capital’s new industrial-scale venue – Dance House Helsinki – has its own architectural rhythms

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cable production in 1985, the vacant building became an informal home for various artists, eventually growing into the institution it is today. The Dance House is the most recent stage of the Cable Factory’s development and has its own storied history. The project came close to realisation several times during the previous century, but gained real impetus in 2007 when the City of Helsinki concluded that dance was being prohibited from reaching the same level as other art forms due to a lack of facilities. In 2013, the city proposed that the Dance House should be located within the vicinity of the Cable Factory, and a donation from the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation the following year effectively sealed the deal. Helsinki-based architecture firm JKMM has been involved since the feasibility stage and was tasked with designing the new building, the programme of which seamlessly straddles both renovated portions of the existing Cable Factory

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ABOVE Erkko Hall, the largest performance space at the new Dance House RIGHT JKMM’s new structure for Dance House, with varying steel facade treatments which reference aspects of dance

IMAGES: TUOMAS UUSHEIMO

ALMOST NINE DECADES after renowned Finnish dancer Maggie Gripenberg first proposed a dedicated space for dance in Helsinki, Finland’s capital finally has its Dance House. Totalling 6,800 sqm and constructed for €42m (£35.8m), the new venue sees the curtain rise on its first performance in February 2022. Dance House Helsinki is an addition to Finland’s largest cultural hub: the Cable Factory, home to a vast array of cultural activities from individual artist studios to the Finnish Museum of Photography. A significant former industrial building located within the Ruoholahti district of Helsinki, the Cable Factory was constructed in 1943 to house the production of rubber and marine cables, and was designed by architect Wäinö G Palmqvist. The 57,000 sqm U-shaped building encloses a long, streetlike courtyard and its pale sand-lime brick elevations are punctured with windows in rigorous yet varied grids. After ceasing

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ABOVE The project encloses almost half of the Cable Factory’s courtyard in a glazed box, forming a new ‘heart’

and an adjoining new structure. Teemu Kurkela, founding partner of JKMM and lead designer of the Dance House, describes the new building as ‘one machine added to the Cable Factory’, adding: ‘They used to have machines for cables or cutting; in this case, it’s a machine for dance.’ The new addition extends the Cable Factory’s north wing eastwards, defining a new public space to the south, and a park to the north. The project also includes the ambitious enclosure of almost half of the Cable Factory’s courtyard in a glazed box, forming a new ‘heart’ from which various parts of the cultural hub can be accessed. The architects’ approach here is flawless: a series of new steel trusses has been placed halfway up the facade, in line with an existing industrial bridge crane, the trusses of which are echoed in the new roof structure. It’s a sensitive and fitting way to enclose a portion of the courtyard, creating an internal space which can be functional all year round,

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while maintaining the atmosphere of an industrial yard. From this space, visitors to the Dance House move through a pair of huge steel doors into the Event Square, a black cube lined with raw steel into which the Cable Factory’s existing east facade penetrates, replete with graffiti and strange concrete accoutrements. A bar runs the length of the wall opposite, sunk into a deep reveal like some kind of industrial control room. This well-proportioned space is top-lit with natural light and, once open to the public, a light installation tracking the movement of visitors will adorn the ceiling. From here, visitors can access two performance spaces: the Pannu Hall, which can hold 400, and the Erkko Hall, which seats 700 with a maximum capacity of 1,000. The Pannu Hall is essentially a ‘found’ performance space, located in the old boiler room of the former industrial building. The existing concrete structure and patchwork brick infill have been retained and exposed, with new iconeye.com

IMAGES: THIS AND NEXT SPREAD – PETER VUORENRINNE

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ARCHITECTS We are a Helsinki based architecture firm specialized in renovation and sustainable architecture. www.avarrus.fi

ARCHITECTURE / PROJECT

RIGHT JKMM’s steel-clad addition faces the historic, brick Cable Factory building

additions denoted in black steel. A fly grid and flexible auditorium seating have been added to make the Pannu Hall as versatile as possible, while retaining the unique spatial and material qualities which undoubtedly drew artists to the vacant building 30 years ago. The Erkko Hall is a black box auditorium, featuring a proscenium arch and an impressive fly tower. The hall has been designed specifically for dance with retractable seating and an even floor between the stage and auditorium. ‘The floor is flat so that everybody in the room can see the feet of the dancers and there’s no orchestra pit, so that’s unusual,’ says Kurkela. ‘Normally in theatres, if you have a dance performance, the dancers can be in danger of falling or the audience might not be able to see the performer’s whole body, but here the stage is the right size and everybody can see.’ Back in the Event Square, a stair descends into a cellar, cutting through the existing building’s concrete slab and revealing an almost archaeological slice of different aggregates, bringing to mind Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘building cuts’ (1972-78). The cellar contains a cloakroom, bar and event space, all wrapped around gnarled concrete columns and even the circular concrete base of the building’s long-since-demolished chimney – remnants of the space’s former life as the boiler room cellar. Externally, the building is equally as fascinating, but perhaps not quite as unequivocally successful. The main volume stands at approximately 27m tall with two secondary volumes stepping down to around 9.5m in the north. The building has three different facade treatments: a subtly reflective steel panelling to the south, weathering steel panelling to the east, and black profiled steel with sanded marine-grade aluminium ‘dots’ to the north and at the entrance. Kurkela explains that the facades have been designed to reference different aspects of dance, with the south and east alluding

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LEFT Dance can permeate all areas of the building

IMAGES: TUOMAS UUSHEIMO / HANNU RYTKY

ABOVE The rhythmic aluminium dots of the facade meet the weathered steel

The facades have been designed to reference different aspects of dance Spring 2022

to ‘gravity defying’ and ‘illusionary’ qualities, and the aluminium dots playing on the idea of ‘rhythm’. Both the south and east facades are constructed as planes suspended from the main volume, which Kurkela describes as ‘defying gravity – it looks like there’s no weight, as if they are floating, but when you look more closely there are thousands of kilos of steel, so it’s a bit like dance in that it looks effortless and gravity defying but there are lots of muscles behind it and years of practice.’ The facades are exquisitely detailed, and the structures are undoubtedly intelligent, featuring large laser-welded steel panels which minimise weight and reduce the need for additional supporting structure. However, the intended sense of weightlessness does not feel strongly enough articulated, and the large panels contribute to a general feeling of monumentality. This presents something of a dichotomy: on one hand, the building clearly relates to the industrial scale of

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Ruoholahti, with its cityscape dominated by large industrial buildings; on the other, it’s hard not to feel that the new building dominates its immediate context – the new facades, including the dotted north facade, feel out of scale next to the rigour and fine grain of the Cable Factory’s brick elevations. What’s more, this abundant use of steel also feels jarring in 2022, and raises questions regarding the environmental impact of the building. The architects point to the adaptive reuse of the existing factory building as a key tenet of their approach to sustainable design. JKMM suggests the Erkko Hall’s black box theatre utilises minimal decoration in order to reduce the volume of construction material required. Steel was apparently chosen as a facade material for its resilience, aiming to ensure that the lifespan of the building is as long as possible, and single-substance materials have reportedly been prioritised in order to facilitate the eventual reuse and

ABOVE The Pannu Hall is located in the old boiler room of the Cable Factory, with concrete structures exposed

recycling of the construction elements. Operationally, the building will be audited for compliance with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation’s EcoCompass environmental management system, and all stage materials and props are intended to be recyclable. Returning to the exterior, the most intriguing aspect of its appearance is the subtly reflective south facade. Described by JKMM as ‘reflective and immaterial’, it defines the north side of a public space bordered to the west by the Cable Factory. JKMM’s facade is intended to literally reflect the Cable Factory’s elevation, aiming to provide a shimmering ‘illusion’ and draw visitors into the glazed courtyard. Such reflections were extremely subtle during my winter visits, and placing such a large, essentially blank, facade in this prominent location feels instinctively like a missed opportunity. It may be, however, that more time is needed for the potential of this facade to be revealed: ‘The architectural pieces are

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really huge both outside and inside, so there’s not the normal “decoration and it’s ready”,’ says Kurkela. ‘You can put dancers and lights into the architecture and then it feels ready. It has the feeling that you are on a stage on the inside, but maybe also on the outside: there are supposed to be some people there, and lights, and then you get this feeling that you are the centre of attention.’ Kurkela goes on to describe how this facade is waiting for dancers, artists and producers to use it as backdrop for media projections and performances; the architecture isn’t really complete until it is inhabited. Perhaps the success of this facade will hinge on how far this idea is taken by artists, performers, and even the public, in the future. If it is treated less as a piece of precious ‘architecture’ and more as an industrial-scale stage set, then the possibilities for interaction and adaptation are almost limitless. In this sense, the new building has the potential to really live – just as the Cable Factory has over the decades. iconeye.com

IMAGE: HANNU RYTKY

ARCHITECTURE / PROJECT

WOVEN TO LAST Made in Finland since 1989

Flagship Store Erottajankatu 1, 00130 Helsinki, Finland Online johannagullichsen.com

Words by Reanna Merasty

Joar Nango The work of the Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect asks new questions about land and identity

THE ARCHITECT AND artist Joar Nango was born in 1979 in the town of Alta, on Norway’s northern coast. He is SámiNorwegian, and was raised around reindeer herders in a traditional community in Sàpmi (the term for the territory of the Sámi people, which covers a northern swath of the Fennoscandian Peninsula). In his work, the traditions of territory actively influence the intersections of materiality, capitalism, indigeneity and Sámi narratives. Nango creates publications and installations that give voice to Sámi identity, including The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture – also titled Girjegumpi – which is a virtual database established in 2018 that expands the global narrative of indigeneity and architecture. Another work, The Indigenuity Project (since 2010) – named after a combination of the words ‘indigeneity’ and ‘ingenuity’

– highlights the local and resourceful traditions of Sámi. Exploring other forms of media and representation, Nango developed the three-part video series PostCapitalist Architecture TV (2021) looking at Indigenous design practices. As a student of architecture experiencing the absence of contemporary Sámi culture in architectural discourse, Nango began working on a conceptual level to address conversations on indigeneity. The urge to create an awareness of Indigenous architecture led to the creation of platforms where healthy Indigenousled discussions can occur. This awareness began with his master’s thesis, which was a magazine titled Sámi Architecture, and which created a space for ‘an open and free way on what Indigenous architecture or Sámi architecture can be, could have been, or was never allowed to be,’ he says. Nango initially studied art prior to

architecture and, typical of this art-infused practice, has been more interested in curiosity than conclusions. ‘Artists are usually swimming around in questions, not wanting to reach into answers,’ he says. ‘Whereas with architects, we are – through our education – trained to solve problems, and find pragmatic subjects. For me as a person, I am more comfortable swimming in circles with artists.’ I was first introduced to the work of Nango at the Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art in 2018, on Treaty One Territory where I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Sámi architect and artist sat on a panel discussing Indigenous architecture, speaking eloquently on traditional ways of knowing, and the symbiosis of nature. We spoke again in November 2021 to discuss his work and its common elements of land, territory and identity.

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The principle of locality is important across different Indigenous nations, where our relation to the landscape is always intimate and inherent. How has your territory and nomadic traditions of your community influenced you or shaped your process?

ABOVE The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture, at Bergen Kunsthall in 2020

IMAGES: THOR BRODRESKIFT / NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA

I think being Indigenous, no matter how you look at it, or how you discuss it, you always end up with the perspective of the land – and the relationship between the land, culture and people. It is a complex and symbiotic relation for all living creatures and human beings. For me, Sámi architecture, and culture, exemplifies this symbiotic relationship between man and land in a very good way. The land is a place to learn. There’s a lot of knowledge systems, traditional ways of knowing, in terms of how to live on the land, respond to it, utilise it, respect

it and talk about it. That has become a guiding star for how I see architecture in an ideal world. It can be a role model for architecture to find a way towards a more sustainable and environmentally conscious idea about itself. As an architect I am driven by decolonisation. You’ve experienced all these traumas [in Canada] as Indigenous people, the way you’ve been treated; very similar to your residential school systems, we also had this institutional violence where the government was deliberately trying to erase our language, erase our culture, and wanting to possess our lands. So of course, that is a big part of what I’m doing as well, to create these types of conversations and give them space. I also think about Indigenous cosmologies and land relations as something that has a lot of potential for the development of architecture.

RIGHT Sámi Architectural Library, at the National Gallery of Canada in 2019

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‘People in rural Indigenous communities have this capacity to use what is at hand to solve a problem’

It represents a perspective that is needed and could become universal and human. When I say this, it sounds a bit romanticised, but I don’t think about it as moving backwards in time, getting rid of all technology, and living in this ideal past. I’m talking about an attitude. I’ve been trying to exemplify that in my spatial installations for example, where I look at how contemporary Indigenous culture reprogrammes mass consumer objects – such as using Coca-Cola as a product to derust your fishing or hunting knife. I was in Igloolik [northern Canada], where the Inuit served me fermented walrus fat, which has a very distinct taste and smell, but leaves your fingers with a strong odour. To get rid of that fat, the only thing to use is Heinz ketchup, probably because that has a lot of acidity to it. I’ve been collecting

those types of stories. I think they’re interesting because they are showing the attitude towards the material world around you, and the immediacy and extreme creativity and elasticity, which for me represents a strong alternative to consumer mentality, and to the human mindset of the capitalist system that has pacified our minds. We are used to being offered solutions and products that are sort of dictating our behaviour, and I think there’s a really interesting type of worldview or life philosophy we very often find in Indigenous communities, where it is more of an open attitude towards the material world and the landscape. You have often coined the term ‘Indigenuity’ to decolonise through the use of material and contextual elements of a place. How has this evolved for you throughout your practice?

ABOVE Documentary image from The Indigenuity Project

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ABOVE Renders of The Sámi National Theater Beaivváš and Sámi High School and Reindeer Husbandry School, in Kautokeino, Norway, designed with Snøhetta

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That term ‘Indigenuity’ – a mixture of the words ‘indigeneity’ and ‘ingenuity’ – came out of a frustration towards a folkloristic representation of Indigenous people. I was frustrated in seeing a large amount of architecture that was done within Sámi communities that was always repeating the same folkloristic and exotic image. I wanted to create another type of visual typology that I felt was more up to date in relation to Sámi space. If this symbolic architecture isn’t representing us fully, what are the alternative and contemporary Sámi spaces? I sought to search for that. One of the most interesting things I found during that search was ‘Indigenuity’. It was this type of pragmatic aesthetic – this backyard, ‘I can do it myself’ type of fixing and repairs that form part of a vernacular tradition where people in rural Indigenous communities have this capacity to use what is at hand to solve a problem. It’s reminiscent of a lifestyle very close to the land. It is an attitude more than an aesthetic; a cultural tradition that is a resourceful and holistic way of thinking and adapting. For me, that attitude has become an interesting alternative to approach a discussion of what Sámi space and architecture can be. I think it has values and connection to the nomadic lifestyle of the Sámi herders. When I visited reserves and rural Indigenous communities in Canada, I found a lot of the same. It was interesting for me to see this same type of pragmatic aesthetic of ‘Indigenuity’. Originally I was looking at my home community, in my aunt’s backyard. It’s the ultimate showcase of ‘Indigenuity’. She was forced to live resourcefully, and was good at making the most out of little. The first formal departure of the idea was postcards, using the format of representation – on postcards you can find the most exotic image of any culture. I used postcards as a format of presenting the aspect of ‘Indigenuity’ that I found in my research. The project is presented as a stack of 54 postcards that are showing examples of backyard fixes and ‘Indigenuity’ attitudes. What I find interesting about your projects is you are trying to expand the range of Indigenous architecture internationally. Part of that work is knowledge transfer or sharing of Indigenous architectures and broadening the impact of the principles of ‘Indigenuity’ through projects like The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture (Girjegumpi) and The Indigenuity Project. How has this been important to you? Spring 2022

To be honest, I see myself as a small piece in a global conversation. I come from a generation where a lot of space is already carved out. I feel that making the conversation around Sámi architecture into something international and global, and trying to facilitate conversation around Indigenous architecture is almost like a responsibility that I take on as a more natural thing. Because I think that it is part of my culture. It’s a way of strengthening the conversation and mirroring each other across the Atlantic Ocean. It has been a way of learning, because you are able to see yourself from the outside. You’re able to see your perspectives and how you feel as a minority. You feel so minor speaking from an Indigenous perspective, there are so many people that turn their back to it, and it is a marginalised position to speak from. When we do this forging of international relations, we are creating confidence amongst ourselves. In today’s world we have the capacity to shape our own networks. We can choose to forge our creative professional network. It was recently announced that you were part of the winning proposal for the Sámi National Theater Beaivváš and Sámi High School and Reindeer Husbandry School. How has your experience been intersecting the principles of vernacular/Indigenous and contemporary architecture through this project?

It’s a very new and challenging role for me to take. In one way, it is talking and thinking about architectures, but I haven’t been involved in the large-scale production of architecture. It is a lot more challenging when you think about these things in a design process that is led and defined by already existing protocols and formats of how architecture is supposed to be. And it is led by the flow of economy and structures of power that are set in a large-scale process. It has been challenging for me to find a place where I can express myself, or be part of creating something, or put my finger on a design. I got the opportunity to be part of the competition for an institutional building, by the government, and to compete in a closed competition. We developed a team and partnered with Snøhetta, a Norwegian architecture firm. My role was most important in insisting on visiting the site. We were exposed to the culture, landscape and people involved in the building. I worked to make sure the reference towards Sámi culture and understanding

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of Sámi space and landscape was treated respectfully, and that the culture was depicted in a forward-thinking way. The first thing we decided was, instead of having the building have one large Sámi narrative, we wanted it to have many. You will find small anecdotes of references to Sámi architecture and lifestyles scattered throughout the building. The whole image of the building was given a name, which is ‘Čoarvemátta’, which refers to the inner part of the reindeer antler, and that part is the strongest bone material. It was a reference to give a leading image to the building, and connect it to the culture it belongs to. My participation was more prominent in the initial project development phase. As the building progresses, my role starts to get smaller and smaller, and to be honest I don’t find it that interesting to decide the size of the doorways and ventilation, and that’s not what I’m good at either. I’m now stepping out of that and into the artistic component of the building. I am responsible for curating the art programme and having them think about art in a more material sense and integrate it in the building. I’m making a strategic plan on how visual art can be integrated in architecture in an early phase. It has been challenging, how the architectural system is embedded in capitalistic ways of thinking. There’s a big contrast to the Indigenous way of thinking and the way this system is built, it’s a very western construct. How can we as Indigenous architects, thinkers, creatives, place our cultural connection into the system? My final design thesis looked at the overarching process of colonial architecture, which is to separate nature from architecture. How should we rethink the process of architecture to include all of creation? I didn’t design an enclosed building at the end because it felt foreign to put a wall in front of a plant. That is the whole purpose of Indigenous people – we want to be able to sense and feel nature. I felt architecture was a barrier for those types of experiences.

Exactly, you are almost forced from this to be anti-architect in a way. I also want to avoid that; I don’t think that’s the way to go. It mirrors how Indigenous cultures are in society at large: there is a tendency to polarise Indigenous culture from the rest of the world, and that dynamic is what we struggle with, and can be challenging. When you deal with architecture

ARCHITECTURE / Q&A

particularly, it becomes apparent. What we need to do is look forward to when these two worldviews merge, and reinvent architecture at large through these types of perspectives. Thinking more humbly, what’s the next step, and what can we start to contribute? As Indigenous designers, we are often honouring processes that are sensitive and help shape our collective future. This is evident in the recent concept of ‘Indigenous Futurisms’, a vision of the future of Indigenous people that intersects traditions and technology. How would you define Indigenous Futurisms?

I think that architecture in one way has this capacity of being a place for utopias to exist – or for far-out gestures of how our work can look to find place and

IMAGES: PERVIOUS PAGE – SNOHETTA /

‘Architecture is an exciting format through which to think about the future, and Indigenous perspectives are needed’

manifest themselves. That is the power of architecture that we should respect and think about. We should, as Indigenous architects and creatives, understand our place in that type of format, and that indigeneity, space-making and landscape understanding that we need to incorporate more in the future. Indigenous Futurisms is not only speculative, it is needed. Those things are interesting when they go together: it’s needed speculations. Architecture is an exciting format through which to think about the future, and Indigenous perspectives are needed both for our own sake to decolonise our mindsets, but also through a universal lens where humans don’t separate themselves from land. We need to find and search for all possibilities to reconnect ourselves. Indigenous cosmologies and landscape understanding is one of the ways to place ourselves in the environment.

ABOVE The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture installed in Jokkmokk, Sweden, in 2018

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COMING CLEAN IN OSLO Norway’s capital is aiming to be ahead of the curve in targeting zero-emission construction – but it’s not without challenges

THIS PAGE The diamond-patterned facade of Mad Arkitekter’s Kristian Augusts gate 13, made predominantly with reused materials

A DIAMOND PATTERN spreads across the side facades of a central Oslo office building. Although only visible from a new network of passages within the city block, this cladding on Kristian Augusts gate 13 sends a signal that may help save the planet from climate catastrophe. The refurbishment and extension project by Mad Arkitekter was almost completely done with reused materials. What we build with, no matter how energy-efficient the design, is a core issue in the environmental monster that comes with architecture: construction. In 2020, Oslo faced the problem by being in the first five cities to sign up to the C40 Clean Construction Declaration, pledging to halve embodied emissions and achieve zero-emission construction sites by 2030. C40, an association of city mayors committed to tackling the climate emergency in an equitable way, reckons that a simultaneously expanding and urbanising world population requires the equivalent construction to building a new New York City every month until 2050. According to the association, construction accounts for 23% of humanity’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and consumes over 30% of resources. Even a net-zero building (effectively one whose operation generates no net GHGs) has a carbon cost in terms of the embodied energy of its materials and the construction process that made it. Norway’s North Sea fossil fuel reserves have let it accumulate the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, much of which is now being channelled into initiatives dealing with the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, such as the recently approved Longship carbon capture and storage project. Oslo is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe in terms of population, and six municipalities in its region collaborate as FutureBuilt, a programme which since 2010 has aimed for a climate-neutral built environment that is ‘attractive and livable’. Targeted primarily at developers, FutureBuilt sets out strict criteria for designating ‘pilot’ projects to demonstrate its principles of halving GHG emissions beyond regulatory requirements. The programme has long advocated clean construction, and its CEO Birgit Rusten believes the C40 Clean Construction Declaration is influenced by the experiences from Oslo and FutureBuilt, which it is now hoped can be replicated around the world. The newest landmark public building in Oslo designated as a FutureBuilt pilot project is the 54,600 sqm National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, opening in June and designed by Kleihues + Schuwerk. It absorbs the collections and functions of two old and charming institutions, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, which many will miss. The new, long, low National Museum structure meets Passivhaus standards, and is partially powered by a heat pump drawing thermal energy from seawater. Low-carbon concrete and natural stone push it towards satisfying the C40 declaration. But the lead designer, Naples-based German architect Klaus Schuwerk, questions the genuine motives behind – and efficacy of – declarations like C40’s. Norway is the world’s fourth largest exporter of gas and tenth

ABOVE The new National Museum in Oslo – a FutureBuilt project – uses low-carbon concrete and natural stone

largest exporter of oil; Schuwerk asks why ‘they don’t simply leave the oil where it is instead of signing “Clean Construction Declarations” which might turn out to be “Dirty Construction Declarations”’. When last audited by FutureBuilt, the museum had reached 47.6% in CO2 emission reduction beyond regulatory requirements – but it’s not finished yet. What about the construction work itself? Oslo began the transition to emission-free construction sites in 2017 when municipal projects switched to using biofuels. The sustainability of biofuels has since been cast into doubt because of issues including associated deforestation, but this is not the case for biogas, which FutureBuilt still approves for mass transport. In 2020, Oslo delivered its first entirely electrically powered construction site – a comprehensive street upgrade in the city centre. A large majority of Norway’s domestic electricity supply is hydroelectric and wind, so electric tools and vehicles approach zero emissions as well as being non-polluting and reducing noise at site. A FutureBuilt pilot project under construction, Fyrstikkbakken 14 by LINK Arkitektur, reveals logistical challenges to clean construction, however. Situated in Oslo’s steeply sloped suburbs, the

Even a net-zero building has a carbon cost in terms of the embodied energy of its materials 168

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IMAGE: IWAN BAAN, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NORWAY

ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE

BYST E D

DUX 6006 WITH ANNA HEADBOARD Anna Headboard in oak, designed by Copenhagenbased Norm Architects for DUX. A minimalistic and visually appealing headboard with supportive padding for added comfort.

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project comprises 160 flats in four towers built of sustainably sourced mass timber on a site that drops 30m vertically. The diggers on site were biofuelled, but the developer – Olav Birkenes of Birk & Co – wants to switch to electric diggers in light of the issues surrounding biofuel. The problem is, currently almost none are available, but they are in production. With green housing costing more to both build and buy, Birkenes says ‘we need incentives’ for the Norwegian consumer, like the tax exemptions that electric cars enjoy. His company has several schemes in the pipeline. Another is at Lachmanns vei, where a cascade of houses on pillars preserving another steep slope underneath was proposed. That was against the building regulations, so a different solution had to be pursued which involves removing ‘vast quantities of stone and pushing the houses down’, he laments. ‘Instead of maybe 300 truck journeys, it will need perhaps 1,300.’ He advocates a ‘fast lane’ through bureaucracy for green projects, but says the Oslo politicians ‘are listening but they are not doing’. Dealing with regulation was also ‘very difficult’ at that project with the diamond facades, Kristian Augusts gate 13, says Noora Khezri of Mad Arkitekter – but ‘now the procedure is documented, the next time will use less money and time’. Developer Entra could have rebuilt, but decided to remodel, the 1950s eight-storey office block. Mad took reuse to the extreme. Completed in 2021, the whole 4,300 sqm building – including a full-height extension at the back – not only comprised 80% reused materials (taken from the original building or sourced

ABOVE Kringsjå Student Village (2020) by LMR, a FutureBuilt project using cross-laminated timber and solar panels OPPOSTITE Kristian Augusts gate 13 (2021) by Mad Arkitekter

‘In the circular economy, you design [based] on the elements you find.’ Noora Khezri

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IMAGES: MAD ARKITEKTER – KYRRE SUNDAL / TOVE LAULUTEN – FUTUREBUILT

ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE

ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE

elsewhere), but also saved 70% of CO2 emissions compared to building with new materials. Elements from offsite sources range from concrete slabs from the government quarter bombed in the ‘22/7’ right-wing terrorist attack of 2011, to door handles from schools under renovation. The terracotta-like diamond cladding is made from stone composite panels from two buildings in Trondheim and metal plates from a 1980s care home. ‘In the circular economy, you design [based] on the elements you find, [from] our network, on websites and everywhere,’ comments Khezri. The building is a FutureBuilt ‘exemplar project’ (FutureBuilt actually became a tenant) and has attracted wide attention. Khezri goes as far as to say: ‘Because it raised awareness about material [reuse], we are witnessing a revolution in building in Norway.’ Issues such as biofuels and bureaucracy may be bumps in the learning curve to achieving Oslo’s Clean Construction Declaration, but it is clearly not greenwash. Progress, including transitioning to electric construction equipment and the concept proof of ‘circular building’ through reuse, provides crucial lessons. The whole world needs to learn them – urgently.

ABOVE Oslo’s transition to ‘clean’ construction sites relies on electric diggers

‘We are witnessing a revolution in building in Norway.’ Noora Khezri

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ARCHITECTURE / ICON

Toppila Silo by Alvar Aalto Aalto’s dramatic wood chip silo in northern Finland is being given a new lease of life as an architectural research centre

Words by Lemma Shehadi

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ARCHITECTURE / ICON

THIS PAGE The original factory in Toppila, 1938

Spring 2022

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ALVAR AALTO’S TOWERING pyramidshaped silo in the Toppila district of the northern Finnish city of Oulu has survived decades of disuse and extreme weather. Located just below the Arctic Circle, it was part of a cellulose factory, the material used for making paper. But today, there is little to indicate its design by a pioneering architect of international modernism. In fact, the silo’s new owner, Adam Lowe of the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation has described it as a ‘local eyesore’.  Yet Lowe hopes to change that. In August 2020, Factum and London-based architecture firm Skene Catling de la Peña purchased the silo from Oulu. They plan to transform the building into a research centre for architectural preservation in the Arctic Circle. The silo will be restored and a new building will be developed in dialogue next to it. ‘We want to keep the silo’s raw state as visible as possible,’ says Charlotte Skene Catling. ‘For the new building, we’re looking at eco-concretes, or how to surgically cut up and reuse local buildings that are scheduled for demolition.’ Once completed, the silo can serve as an example for the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings in the Arctic. ‘The buildings further north that were built on permafrost didn’t have any foundations. They are collapsing now that the ice is melting,’ Lowe explains. Silos occupied an important part of the modernist imagination, appearing in publications by Walter Gropius as well as Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture. ‘They represented an intoxicating escape from orthodox architectural forms,’ Skene Catling said in a recent lecture about Aalto’s silo. The European architects were inspired by photographs of American grain silos that had revolutionised agriculture in the mid-19th century – though none had travelled there to see them. ‘The massive cylindrical towers were inhuman,’ says Skene Catling, who has been researching historical silos in Buffalo, New York state. ‘Yet Aalto’s was different. It feels like an expressionist cathedral,’ she adds, highlighting possible influences from German avant-garde cinema. Built in 1931, the Toppila factory was Aalto’s first design for an industrial complex, which paved the way for his

ARCHITECTURE / ICON

better-known sites such as the Sunila Pulp Mill in Kotka (1936-38). But some speculate about the role that his wife Aino, a trained architect, could have played in the building. The Finnish documentary Aalto (2020) has shed light on the influence she had on her husband’s work. She and the Bauhaus school’s László Moholy-Nagy went up to Toppila to photograph the building upon its completion. The main restoration challenge for Skene Catling will be transforming a building intended for storing wood chips into a space that can be used by humans. Owing to the silo’s original structural engineers, the 28m-high shell of reinforced concrete is just 10cm thick. ‘It gets incredibly cold inside,’ says Skene Catling. ‘But we don’t want to put insulation everywhere because we want

the building’s raw state to be visible.’ Inside, perforations in the concrete let drops of light in. This is where timber pegs were used to hold the shuttering before the concrete was poured. ‘They look like stars – they’re beautiful,’ explains Skene Catling, ‘We’d like to plug them with glass so that you can still see the light.’ The restoration may also reference the factory’s industrial processes, where the wood chips processed in the building next door were carried by a shaft to the silo. ‘There’s an angled route to the top of the building that we want to turn into a lift shaft for visitors,’ says Skene Catling. ‘Then you make your way down the building as the original route would have been.’ The project marks a shift away from Oulu’s highly polluting industrial

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past – a problem faced by other cities in and around the Arctic. The city’s production of pine tar, the material used to waterproof the timber on ships, attracted British merchants and industrialists. This included Peter Dixon & Son, the newsprint manufacturer that established the cellulose factory at Toppila. With the collapse of these industries, Oulu, and Toppila in particular, declined. But today, the city is re-emerging as a tech hub, following investment from Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone company, in the 1990s. Factum and Skene Catling de la Peña hope to complete the project in time for 2026, when Oulu will be designated as the European Capital of Culture. ‘When the factory closed down in 1985 there was no sense of reuse,’ says Lowe. ‘It was a pre-green world.’   iconeye.com

IMAGES: FINNISH HERITAGE AGENCY, JOKA JOURNALISTINEN KUVA-ARKISTO KALEVA / LAURI KLEMOLA / ARCTIC DRONE LABS

BELOW The remaining silo structure, in 2021

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Pathfinders for bio-based design, innovative materials, and design solutions for a circular economy in the two-day international hybrid seminar. TOP S PEAK ER S: William Myers, Michael Pawlyn, Andrea Trimarchi & Simone Farresin (Studio Formafantasma), Sofia Pia Belenky, Daniel Grushkin, ChemArts designers from Finland: Pirjo Kääriäinen, Irene Purasachit, Manuel Arias Barrantes and more. Admission-free and open to everyone. Register at www.alvaraalto.fi/designseminar Join the Alvar Aalto Design Talk discussion group on

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REVIEW

Review

BELOW Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery (1915-40) in Stockholm

IMAGE: JOHAN DEHLIN

Exhibition Sigurd Lewerentz at ArkDes

Spring 2022

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Words by Ellinor Thunberg –––

Sigurd Lewerentz From shopping to dying, a new Stockholm exhibition shows how the Swedish architect understood the human condition

ABOVE Lewerentz outside St Mark's Church, Stockholm

THE FIRST THING I notice when walking towards ArkDes’ comprehensive exhibition about the Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz (18851975) is the bold and bright lettering hanging from the ceiling. Graphic design studio Malmsten Hellberg’s signage is surprisingly colourful for leading the way to a show of an architect so widely associated with death. Lewerentz’s iconic works – Woodland Cemetery (1915-40) and St Mark’s Church (1960) in Stockholm, and St Peter’s Church (1963-66) just north of Malmö – are sombre and monumental affairs, but

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I soon realise just how fitting the colourful letters are. There is more to Sigurd Lewerentz than meets the eye – and that’s one thing this exhibition at ArkDes wants to show. A non-narrated film at the start of the show confirms the image we have been left with: the elderly architect visiting a construction site dressed in a long black coat and hat. We enter the first room, recreating the ‘Black Box’ – Lewerentz’s last studio space in Lund, which he used between 1970 and 1975. There, he spent a lot of time arranging the 13,000 drawings he ultimately left to ArkDes; iconeye.com

IMAGES: PÅL-NILS NILSSON / JOHAN DEHLIN

REVIEW / EXHIBITION

REVIEW / EXHIBITION

ABOVE Lewerentz’s Black Box studio recreated at ArkDes

Spring 2022

the exhibition shows a total of 600 objects, most of them from the very same collection. Entering the Black Box is like getting a glimpse into Lewerentz’s imagination. The room is immersively lined with a metallic material, referencing the aluminium cardboard Lewerentz used to block out light in the original studio. The room is full of proposals, drawings, books from his library, as well as photographs and postcards. It reminds us that behind every architect there is a hidden treasure of unbuilt projects and ideas, especially with a mysterious

figure such as Lewerentz who rarely wrote about his work or spoke in public. But here we get to see his favourite coffee, what sweets he kept in his desk drawer, his old address book and the pencils he used for his thousands of drawings. It feels like being let in on a secret. ‘When I arrived in Sweden [in 2017], I realised there had never been a collections-based proper exhibition about the work of the greatest architect Sweden has ever had,’ says ArkDes director and curator Kieran Long. The opportunity to create an in-depth exhibition and a 700-page

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monograph about Lewerentz was one of the key reasons Long took the job and relocated from London to Stockholm. The exhibition, designed by Caruso St John Architects, is divided into six different areas. After the Black Box, we enter a green-painted room dedicated to the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm – now a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and the Eastern Cemetery (1965) in Malmö, two of Lewerentz’s most important works. Proposals and drawings, including quirky and surprising elements not previously known, are on display.

ABOVE Lewerentz’s proposal for a floating dance floor at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 (unbuilt)

There is more to Sigurd Lewerentz than meets the eye

The exhibition journey subsequently becomes chronological, and takes us into a small blue room offering insights into his early years, which also works as a kind of palate cleanser for what’s next: retail. In this cheerful room a patterned wallpaper designed by Lewerentz has been recreated, and the walls are filled with watercolour paintings created by his studio. The effect feels glamorous, glitzy and cinematic – almost like something straight out of a fashion house at the time. The room showcases Lewerentz’s design work for

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the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, which included the fair’s graphic identity, alongside temporary commercial pavilions. It also shows his detailed drawings of hotel interiors and shop exteriors. Here, the contrasting sides of Lewerentz’s work are revealed. ‘Lewerentz is interested in shopping and death,’ says Long. ‘He is interested in the most shallow part of what it means to be a human, and the most deep. And nothing in between, because he knows that’s what it is like to be a human.’ The next phase – in life and the exhibition – focuses iconeye.com

IMAGE: PER MYREHED

REVIEW / EXHIBITION

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REVIEW / EXHIBITION

TOP St Peter’s Church (1963-66), north of Malmö ABOVE St Mark’s Church (1960) in Stockholm

on Lewerentz’s years in the city of Eskilstuna, where he founded the Idesta factory, which created double-glazed window systems. This space also feels like a breather, a pause before entering the final room dedicated to Lewerentz’s two iconic brick churches: St Mark’s and St Peter’s. The sequence of rooms has been cleverly building up to this moment – the grand finale of the exhibition as well as of the architect’s career. The projects are magnificent, and also show the importance of arts and crafts in Lewerentz’s process. ArkDes’ exhibition lets

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visitors get acquainted with Lewerentz on their own terms, no matter if they are already obsessed or if they are new to his work. ‘You find the Lewerentz you need,’ says Long. ‘You turn up at his work and either see craft in it or you see process or commitment – there are all these things.’ I see an architect fascinated with contrasts, focused on extensive drawing as a method – and always surrounded by craftspeople and artists. Simply put, a mastermind. Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life is at ArkDes in Stockholm until 28 August 2022

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IMAGES: JOHAN DEHLIN

BELOW Woodland Cemetery (1915-40) in Stockholm

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PLAY CONTRACT, a project by Copenhagen-based art and design studio Superflex, is a series of playful pink marble sculptures in the town of Billund, central Denmark. The structures were designed and developed in collaborative workshops with over 100 local children. ‘Most public art is made by adults, without taking children’s perspectives into account,’ explains Superflex. ‘With Play Contract, the balance of power is tipped.’ Throughout the co-design process, a contract was drawn up, informed by the children’s perspectives, that requires grown-ups to submit to the conditions and priorities of children’s play in the area of the project. This contract has also been carved into the sculptures, giving the children’s preferences a sense of permanence and power. ‘Adults strive to control the world around them, but play involves allowing for surprises and giving up control,’ says Superflex. 

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