Architectural Research in Finland

Housing design quality in Finland: Room for improvement

Taru Lehtinen — 2024-08-15

Housing is under increasing pressure to respond to societal changes, e.g., an aging population, an increasing number of single person households, increased working from home, climate change and the green transition, and the covid-19 pandemic. This paper investigated how the apartments of a Finnish social housing provider supported residents’ daily lives and well-being and how this can be improved. From a total of 142 rental and right-of-occupancy apartment blocks in the Tampere and Turku regions, ten were selected for analyses and reporting of results in this paper. The floor plans of two representative blocks were further analysed to evaluate their housing design quality. The aspects investigated included daylight, circulation, furnishability and spatial connections. Findings highlighted that there is room for improvement to create more resilient living environments: daylight conditions were found to be below good practice, especially where balconies shaded the main living space or where the room depth prevented daylight from reaching the back parts. The furnishable floor area was fragmented and reduced by essential circulation areas, which on average took up 40% of the habitable floor area. Only 28% of the habitable room floor area was both well daylit and furnishable. Potential improvements to achieve more resilient living environments include better connection between the design of furnishable and well daylit spaces; better overlapping of essential circulation areas to improve furnishability and creating multiple routes inside the apartment to enable the residents to adjust their level of privacy.

Building Management Systems in residential buildings: their role in energy and indoor climate resilience

Raúl Castaño-Rosa — 2024-08-15

The building sector contributes to around 39% of the global carbon emissions, and the operation of buildings, and especially residential buildings, is a large contributor. Hence tackling the efficient operation and maintenance of residential buildings is an effective way to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions and hence contribute to climate resilience. While the operation and maintenance phases of non-residential buildings generally rely on Building Management Systems (BMS), BMS are typically absent in standard housing; instead, residents manage their own homes individually. Through a scoping literature review, this paper investigates the potential of BMS in promoting energy efficiency, indoor climate comfort and long-term resilience (e.g., managing cold periods and heatwaves), and general suitability for the residential environment. Findings show that promoting resilience in residential buildings through the implementation of BMS is not explicitly investigated in the existing literature, instead the focus is on promoting energy efficiency, innovation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, main BMS are designed based on solely technical parameters, neglecting social and human factors. This study therefore argues for the need to adopt a human-centred design approach to include key aspects of adaptability, flexibility, equity and inclusivity in the design and implementation of BMS in residential buildings. In the end, this paper contributes key aspects for BMS to promote resilience in residential buildings.

Rewilding the built environment: a resilient response to different crises

Raúl Castaño-Rosa — 2024-08-15

Society continues to face many crises, from climate change, loss of biodiversity and air pollution to the pandemic, with associated impacts to human health and wellbeing. The built environment plays an important role in both mitigating and adapting to these impacts and in safe-guarding citizens. The presence and access to green spaces in the built environment plays a fundamental role in citizen’s ability to cope with adversity of different kinds and scale, while in itself supporting biodiversity. This paper aims to (1) synthesize knowledge about the diverse role that green spaces, and by extension the rewilding of our built environment, play as part of a resilient society and built environment and (2) the specific conditions and characteristics of green spaces and the built environments to maximize their benefits, while avoiding unintended consequences. This is done through a systematic literature review to present existing knowledge about the role of green spaces in a resilient built environment and society, followed by a qualitative content analysis that identifies the conditions and characteristics of green spaces as resilient solutions. Findings highlight the importance of the diversity of green space provision in type (e.g., ecological corridors), scale (e.g., community gardens, green roofs and walls), and location (e.g., parks, forests), and that they can support social inclusivity, community resilience and wellbeing. Furthermore, findings highlight that green spaces need to be designed in such a way that they (1) support biodiversity, (2) are interconnected with the context, (3) accessible and (4) appealing for citizens to protect and appreciate them.

Finnish mid-rise timber apartment buildings

Antti Tuure — 2024-08-15

Timber apartment buildings are becoming more common in Finland in the form of mid-rise buildings. This study examined data from 55 Finnish mid-rise timber apartment buildings built between 2018 and 2022 under the Finnish Land Use and Building Act, which came into force on 1 January 2018. The study aims to increase the understanding of contemporary practices, potential, benefits, challenges, and future prospects of mid-rise timber apartment buildings in Finland. The data was collected through literature surveys and case studies to examine the architectural, structural, and constructional features. The main findings of this study indicated that (1) shear wall structural system was the only structural system, (2) the most preferred construction method was 3D volumetric construction, followed by 2D panel construction, (3) among the 55 case buildings, solid timber studs (i.e., lightweight timber frame walls) were the most used material for shear walls, followed by cross-laminated timber (CLT), (4) the prevalence of specific structural materials varied depending on the construction method and the number of stories. CLT and laminated veneer lumber (LVL) were utilized in 7- and 8-story buildings, and there was no shear wall at these heights, consisting only of solid timber studs, (5) all case-study buildings had a prismatic (i.e., extruded) form, (6) the most dominant core typology was peripheral core (>50%) with 28 cases, followed by a central core with 24 cases, (7) case studies built using the 2D panel construction method had significantly longer maximum lease span and the average of the maximum lease span, (8) case studies built with 2D panel construction method had higher average floor-to-ceiling and floor-to-floor heights, (9) the average total thickness of intermediate floors and party walls between apartments was similar for both 2D panel and 3D volumetric construction methods. Regarding the thickness of party wall structural material, the thickness of CLT had the most repetitions, followed by solid timber studs, (10) while certain buildings had walls with identical structural thicknesses, there were variations in the total thickness of the walls among them. The research also delves into the interrelations between the selected parameters and the construction methods employed.

Re-evaluating the Aaltos’ Pre-war Housing

Troels Rugbjerg — 2024-08-15

This paper explores the comfort of apartments designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto in the late 1930s in Finland. The focus is on one housing case study: Terassitalo (the terraced house) in Kauttua, (1937-38), which is related to three other housing projects in Sunila, Kotka (1937).

This research forms part of a larger body of field studies exploring the potential of historic examples to offer lessons for the design of high quality domestic environments in the present, with improved levels of comfort in the context of our changing climate.

The documented studies are conducted through mixed methods, which involves quantitative research (e.g., daylight and temperature monitoring and in-situ observations in relation to the climate inside and outside) and qualitative field research (e.g., resident interviews, drawing analysis and archival studies concerning the historical and environmental context).

Findings highlight how this housing case study demonstrate the Aaltos’ concern for the provision of comfort, from the design of the apartments and their orientation, responding to seasonal and diurnal changes in sunlight, and for establishing a relationship with nature, including solar gains and shade from surrounding trees. The architecture allows the residents to control their comfort by adapting to their environment, through passive strategies as well as active heating from radiators. These apartments make it possible for the residents to take advantage of an ever-changing environment. Lessons learned for current and future housing includes designing with orientation, vegetation, empowerment, passive strategies and thermal enjoyment.

Architectural Design from Upcycled Formwork Wood

Gabrielle Nicolas — 2024-08-15

In Finland and many other countries worldwide, standard-quality wood is used as a building material in countless ways, from permanent to temporary uses as auxiliary construction and formwork. Unfortunately, formwork is difficult to clean after its use, which is why the construction industry considers it contaminated, no longer usable and, therefore, waste, and usually sends it to energy recovery. However, the remaining concrete on the formwork wood can be considered a process that can give the boards physical and aesthetic properties not previously considered. The research investigates how salvaged formwork wood performs compared to rough-sawn wood under natural weather conditions based on concrete coverage percentage. It assesses mechanical properties, ageing, and color changes, aiming to find the best fit for each board in new architectural applications such as facades while enhancing durability, and predicting future appearance for sustainability and design values. Our research employs a comprehensive approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as architectural design techniques, to investigate the characteristics and behavior of used concrete formwork wood, considering both untreated and oil-treated variants. The properties of salvaged wood material are experimentally investigated. We (i) photographically scan each wood board to determine concrete coverage using image processing and computer vision, and (ii) conduct combined sun and water absorption tests to understand the performance and color changes of the individual boards. We show that sun exposure enhances water repellency for natural boards and both types of formwork wood, untreated and oil-treated, but comparably, formwork wood exhibits significantly lower water absorption rates. Our results identify oil-treated boards as the most water-repellent but with increased water absorption for elevated temperatures, often associated with sun exposure. These findings are used as input data to create algorithm-assisted customized architectural designs using a color gradient system. This method is a valuable tool for forecasting the surface color and its evolution over time that inversely also refers back to the identified performance of the board. We showcase façade designs on two scales, featuring a realized demonstrator using salvaged formwork wood and a façade study for the CE building at Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, both of them include ageing color gradient-based simulations alongside actual weather and climate data.

Buildings as Objects

Iida Kalakoski — 2024-08-15

The railyard of the Tampere city center, Finland, has been under a massive city development for about 10 years. This article examines how the city planners and different participants have interpreted and recreated the urban space within one controversial planning process and how the different interpretations of the existing buildings are expressed and responded to within such a process. The aim of our study is to conceptualize the interplay between the experts’ and participants’ interpretations about the role of architectural heritage in urban renewal. The studied materials consist of 1) the survey reports written by planning and heritage professionals during the process and of 2) the participants’ comments collected in different phases of the process. We use content analysis methods to compare these two document types focusing on two specific buildings: the former railway workers’ union house Morkku and the old depot office building. We examine these two buildings to understand how and why they were set into competitive position and eventually other one was demolished to make room for the other one. The experts who were involved in the planning of the site and evaluation of the buildings focused on the visual and architectural qualities, but their interpretations were challenged by participants who interpreted the buildings rather as lived architecture than as architectural place or cityscape. We pay attention to how a planning process can accelerate canonization process (Bonta 1975 and 1979) and widen the scope of heritage by exposing certain buildings to the threat of demolition and therefore to the public evaluation. The analysis of this process brings up and questions the established status of architectural examination at the core of evaluation of the built heritage. In this article, we claim that the urban renewal in historical sites looks at the heritage buildings with a visually oriented expert gaze that risks degrading their significance to mere particles of the cityscape. This gaze instrumentalizes the buildings and, as in the presented case, may even put them to competitive position. The expert gaze alone is not sufficient to interpret the variety of significances of the urban heritage. Narrow interpretations cause damage to both, the planning process, and the built environment. The article also discusses the themes of social, cultural, and environmental sustainability while addressing the dominance of traffic planning and visual aspects of the city.

Research Education for Architecture Students – Case Study of an Academic Reading Circle

Anni Vartola — 2024-08-15

This paper describes Tyson Seburn’s (2016) Academic Reading Circle (ARC) groupwork model applied on an introductory research course taught online at the Aalto University, Department of Architecture since 2021. The model was adopted to respond to an increasing demand for research skills among architectural professionals, to support academic literacy and an architect-researcher identity, to lower the threshold between academia and practice, and to cater students with knowledge of the rich methodological opportunities in architectural design fields. The experiment indicates that the rigorously structured ARC model provides an efficient framework for analytical and discursive reading and is highly adaptable to online education on the Master's and Doctoral level. According to both the teacher's experience and the students' feedback, the model increased student collaboration and peer-to-peer learning and enhanced positive attitudes towards advancement of architecture through research and analytical thinking. The model also entailed some risk elements especially if the overall course programme is complex or the group size too large. The paper describes the pedagogical setup, explains the implementation and adaptation of the ARC model, and discusses some ideas for further development.

Transformation of Architectural Design-Research Pedagogy

Rosana Rubio Hernández — 2024-08-15

This paper addresses the concept of transformation as a restorative practice with great potential in architectural education. The concept was used as the foundation of a post-professional, research-oriented master’s degree design studio held for the first time during the spring semester of 2022 as a collaboration between two European universities. Conventionally understood as the action of ‘transmuting something into something else’, transformation implies acknowledging and reinterpreting pre-existences, and therefore challenges creation ex novo, which is a notion traditionally more prevalent in heritage and conservation courses rather than in design courses. However, the potential of this concept can be exploited at different and complementary levels, as this paper aims to demonstrate. This choice was motivated by the imperative of sustainability, where the ethos of reutilisation takes precedence by purposely narrowing scope and concentrating design research strategies on transformative processes.

To be precise, the above-mentioned pilot course explored the concept of transformation from a twofold perspective. Firstly, transformation was understood as a research-through-design strategy that showed students how transformative design actions could be used as actual methods for theoretical research at postgraduate level, interweaving the logics of the creative act with the logics of research and thinking processes. Secondly, transformation was explored from a deeper pedagogical perspective, in line with constructivist approaches and theories of the self, with the specific ambition of triggering significant changes in the way students and teachers think and act. This latter approach led to the application of Jack Mezirow’s (1991) notion of ‘disorienting dilemmas’ as the main educational device of the course, which in turn became a key innovative input for reconsidering the research-through-design methodology. Both levels in which the concept of transformation was used in the course were tied together and intertwined thanks to their interpretation as Raumgeschehen, (‘spatial events’), borrowing Hille von Seggern’s (2019) term.

To evaluate the implications of such a pedagogical proposal, this paper poses and tries to answer three main questions: 1) What are the contributions of the concept of transformation – as conceived, implemented and tested in this course – to the body of knowledge of research through design in educational contexts? 2) To what extent can this understanding of transformation be considered a restorative practice for the architectural discipline? and 3) What would the main guidelines to follow to refine the course for future iterations or to put it into effect in other contexts be?

To answer these questions, authors have used a mixed-method approach, combining a literature review on the concept of transformation and a critical analysis of the students’ performance and other empirical data extracted from a post-course survey taken by both students and teachers. The paper shows the relevant work of the students participating in the course. By assessing their specific achievements, this analysis also serves to identify key guidelines for future iterations of the course or application in other contexts. Ultimately, the study reflects upon the values and possibilities introduced by the concept of transformation within architectural design-research pedagogy on a more general level, inspired by a wide understanding of sustainability.

(A)mending Architecture Education in the Climate Emergency: a focus on values and cultures

Essi Nisonen — 2024-08-15

Research on architecture education in the climate emergency is heavily action focused: while there is a vast body of research around sustainability knowledge and an increasing amount of research on teaching methodology and pedagogy, there is a limited amount of research focusing on the values and cultures that architecture education operates through and promotes, and their connection to unsustainable professional practices. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarly debates, this paper explores broader societal value systems which have formed the foundations of unsustainable values and cultures in architecture, and mirrors them against the key values, cultures and pedagogies of the architectural design studio. The Modernist ideals of rationalism, logic and positivism have justified the separation of humans and nature and have validated the exploitation and oppression of nature and vulnerable communities for profit and the accumulation of capital. In architecture education, this worldview has promoted transmissiveapproaches to learning, forming hierarchical and exclusive cultures around the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Instead, architecture education should transition towards a holistic worldview that does not separate humans from nature, but instead highlights the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life without overlooking the responsibilities that only humans can carry out in caring for the environment. Drawing from the field of environmental education, the approach we suggest promotes critical thinking and reflection with collaborative and inclusive learning cultures fostering mutual dialogue and critical attitudes.

Choose your tools wisely

Kasia Nawratek — 2024-08-15

Architectural education's exclusive and hierarchical roots still shape how architecture is taught and practised. To reveal deeply embedded structures of exclusion, the figure of the architect is deconstructed using Hannah Arendt's division of work and labor. The maintenance art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles is used to highlight the importance of process and reproductive labour, as opposed to object-oriented work. The emergence of the new figure of the architect worker is discussed in the context of changes taking place in the profession.

This article delves into the pressing need to evolve architectural education, emphasising the alignment with methods of inquiry to ensure that the resulting projects are rooted in principles of equity, inclusivity, and sustainability. At the heart of this discourse is the innovative framework of "Radical Inclusivity." This concept is anchored in the dialogic philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin and inspired by Paolo Soleri's understanding of buildings as structures in a constant state of becoming and growing through increasing complexity.

Radical Inclusivity, rooted in the dialogic principle of Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy, is positioned as a framework allowing for the redefinition of the figure of the architect and, in consequence, a more inclusive and equitable architectural practice and pedagogy.

Teaching with wood: reconciling future architects with the forest.

Francesco Camilli — 2024-08-15

The potential of timber to be a strategic material in the pursuit of sustainability in architecture has been demonstrated in recent times by academic research (Ibañez, 2019) and practical experimentation. (Menges et al., 2016) These projects show how an effective use of timber in architecture should be linked to a change of approach towards this material: timber should not be seen as passive and exploitable but rather as a living entity whose complex ecology must be integrated with the design of buildings. Establishing a use of wood that builds on its ecology, rather than opposing and weakening it, can contribute to repairing the relation between mankind and environment. Architectural teaching can be crucial for this goal: design-build and live project initiatives, in which students can confront timber in different stages of design, can give future architects an idea of the extension of the ecology of this material and the environmental implications of its use in the built environment. This paper provides an intellectual framework for a renewed approach to working with timber in architectural education as an effective way of developing a better environmental and ecological conscience in future practitioners. Through a qualitative research approach, this work tries to understand the inspirations, reasons, goals, and commitments of educators choosing to work hands-on with timber with architecture students.

Unravelling the public procurement networks of architectural services in Finland as pathways of transformative innovations and tacit knowledge

Vincent Kuo — 2024-08-15

Progressive transformation of the built environment is ultimately realized by industry practitioners and designers from companies, coupled with targets set by contracting authorities. Thus, insights on real-world collaborative networks in procurement can inform how progressive targets and innovative designs can be incentivized and proliferated through the ecosystem, as indicators of the responsiveness and transformational potential of the whole sector. However, deep insights on procurement networks of architectural services are currently not available for assessing the pathways of transformative knowledge. The aim of our research is to collect, clean and analyze open data about Finnish public procurements of architectural and related services, for insights on the landscapes companies, as key players for transformation in the building sector. We map the collaborative ecosystem country-wide, across more than 500 projects between 2018 and 2021, using data-mining, computational network modelling and graphing algorithms. In this way, communities and densities of companies can be detected and characterized based on their connectedness and influence based on explicit metrics of degree centrality, total link strengths, and distribution of market share. We create data visualizations as networks and graphs, aiding intuitive understanding of how transformative knowledge and innovations could spread through the network. Our principal findings reveal the gross inequality in social capital, as well as market share distribution across the architectural ecosystem, with various dichotomies of implications for transformation of the whole industry in terms of innovation adoption, creative thinking, and resilience. On this basis, we provide some practical recommends for government, industry practitioners, as well as researchers, and encourage deeper considerations on the utilization of network analytics metrics to characterization of complex problems in the architectural and related markets.

Extending the Extension

Ronan Conlon-Dooley — 2024-08-15

Semi-detached houses became a significant component of the housing stock in the suburbs of Dublin, Ireland during the 1960s. However, the new generation of occupants harbour a desire to modify these houses as a manifestation of their family’s identity, desires, or daily routine to make them their homes. There is already a significant body of research into the material alteration of houses and their motives, however much of it predates the urgency of the climate crisis in which we find ourselves, thus there is no reference to the carbon further embedded into these homes by their occupants. The carbon impact of individual developments may seem minute relative to larger structures in cities around the world, but the multitude of constructions such as small back and return extensions on homes generates a surprisingly comparable figure annually.

This research paper investigates the alterations of a set of suburban houses in North County Dublin; the occupant’s stories, motives for modifying, and their satisfaction. In parallel, the embodied carbon associated with these alterations is documented using the Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) database. The research looks at the balance of the domestic value that these new spaces have provided to the homeowners, in comparison to the corresponding carbon data, and the effect that architects understanding the anthropological impetus behind an urge to alter could have on the communication of a more appropriate, carbon conscious design proposals to homeowners.

Drawing Cages

Tommy Kaj Lindgren — 2024-08-15

Understanding how we produce our built environment is a central challenge when we aspire to imagine sustainable futures. In spite of several proposed goals and guidelines for sustainable building, success may often prove elusive in the crosscurrents of interests involved in urban development. This paper is a study of the ambitious Low2no project, that provides an instructive case illustrating challenges and possibilities of sustainable urban development in the context of Finland. The paper presents an Actor-network theory based reading of the project, from conception in 2008 to realization in 2018 as the Airut-block in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki. The project is described as a changing network of actors, human and non-human mediators. The reading follows the trajectory from the initial goals of the project, through different phases, to the finished built environment. The heterogeneous set of documents, written and visual, connected to the project make up the primary material used in drawing this narrative. The analysis results in the first comprehensive description of the project. Conclusions focus on highlighting the mediating role of non-human actors, and their effects on the process, as well as the crucial role they may play when designing similar projects.

Om att uppfinna hjulet på nytt

Jarre Parkatti — 2024-08-15

Stadsplaneringen av idag eftersträvar utpräglad urbanitet, men ofta förblir urbanitetsbegreppet och dess kontextualisering oklara. Begreppet kan klargöras genom att skilja arkitektonisk från social urbanitet och i fråga om arkitektonisk urbanitet, liksom i denna kvartersstudie, ta fasta på idealtypiska drag såsom slutna kvarter, finkornigt uppdelade i tomter och i hus med aktiva gatuplan. Denna prototypiska urbana grundstruktur kan liberaliseras enligt stadsstrukturell kontext för att tillåta bland annat fristående offentliga byggnader och, i förstadsmiljö, ”hus i park”. – Forskningsfrågan är vilka kvartersegenskapernas sociala, ekonomiska och ekologiskt hållbarhetsmässiga följder är för kvarterets och stadens funktion och hur etablerade urbana drag bör vägleda nyskapande planering. Även gränserna för det urbana utstakas därvid. – Teoretiskt utgår studien från att arkitektonisk urbanitet är samhälleligt viktig i och med att bebyggelsemönster influerar beteendemönster. Vid realiseringen bör ändå stadsbyggets vetenskapliga rationalitet förlikas med arkitekturens konstnärliga autenticitet. Utan att vara direkt programmatisk skiljer sig studien från rent deskriptiv forskning. Den avser i princip kunna instruera planeringen utifrån en politisk och professionell relativ konsensus (särskilt om urbanitetens önskvärdhet) samt vetenskaplig kunskap (om kvartersnedbrytningen och dess följder). Dylik forskning bör ses som principiellt bindande om den inte bestrids, trots att den rent faktiskt inte på ett sanktionerat sätt kan ingripa i pragmatisk, inte i första hand teoristyrd, planering. Ståndpunkten förutsätter en i viss mening kritisk, i detta fall struktureringsteoretisk, filosofisk-teoretisk syn. – I den närmare behandlingen betonas kvarterets roll som förmedlare mellan stadens mikro- och makronivå. Därvid noteras kvarterets av kulturella tolkningar beroende, ibland tvetydiga, identitet, motstridiga krav på dess dimensionering samt komplexiteten i kvarterets inre vad gäller permeabilitet, tomtindelning, bebyggdhet och ekonomisk-sociala funktioner. Den urbana grundstrukturen tillåter olika kvartersformer och ‑storlekar och annan variation, som dock kan påverka graden av urban intensitet och diversitet, stadsupplevelsen och stadens funktion. Viktigast för urbaniteten är ändå att den urbana grundstrukturen respekteras där den är tillämplig, nämligen närmast i innerstaden. För en välgrundad gradering av urbaniteten bör staden zonindelas. Förutom de avgörande kategorierna innerstad och förstad ger mer finfördelade begrepp (stadskärna, centrum osv.) en antydan om rätt exploateringsgrad, möjlig utbyggnad av kvarterets inre, husens och gatans gränssnitts karaktär med mera. Sådan ofta intuitiv, men därmed svårförmedlad, kunskap främjar koherent ekonomisk-social och arkitektonisk diversitet både lokalt och inom stadsområdet. – I Helsingfors har den urbana grundstrukturen lidit något av kvartersstora hus i centrum och kvartersöppning i den nya innerstaden. Provinsstäder har avurbaniserats mer påtagligt genom nedbrytning av kvartersstrukturen i rutnätsstaden. – Redan ur arkitektonisk synpunkt är kontextokänsligt urbanitetsfrämjande tveksamt. Därtill har förstadens avskildhet och naturnärhet ett socialt värde. Av hållbarhetsskäl bör den ”riktiga” staden ändå prioriteras. – Till slut presenteras en fallstudie av ett tänkt ekonomiskt-socialt gynnsamt kvartersutvecklande. Exemplet pekar på vikten av lokalt agentskap i den etablerade innerstaden med splittrat privat ägande. Strukturberoende social handling, som delvis abstraheras från, genomsyrar förvisso all stadsutveckling.

Material flows from buildings

Mario Kolkwitz — 2024-08-15

In the circular economy, building stocks are valuable urban mines of secondary resources and reserves of space whose utilization has the potential to substitute for virgin resources. The purpose of this study is to compare patterns in construction (inflows) and demolition (outflows) and how they shaped the building stock in two Finnish cities, Vantaa and Tampere between 2000 and 2018. By attributing flows to distinct urban development patterns (such as greenfield, replacement, infill, etc.) and investigating population and labour force structure, the goal is to recognize differences and similarities between the case studies. In doing so, the aim is to understand how a comparative approach may help to identify drivers and patterns in the building stock dynamics of the two cities which further aids the development of a circular building stock management. The methodological foundation for this research is Urban Metabolism in form of Material Flow Analysis with a focus on the product i.e., building level but also space as a service provided by buildings. Tampere and Vantaa are the third and fourth largest cities in Finland, with a population of circa 230,000 each. Despite their similar sizes, differences in their geographical properties, contexts, and roles in Finland make them interesting targets for comparative research.

The results show that growth in population and labour force led to a substantial increase in both cities’ building stocks. While Vantaa’s more rural character allowed a higher amount of sprawl by loose-built housing typologies, geographical restrictions and the already dense building stock in Tampere often led to more compact housing and an overall higher amount of demolition in relation to construction. The development of both non-residential building stocks shows a clear tendency towards typologies that support respective economic operations. Alas, material intensity coefficients, which would enable quantifying the material and CO2 impacts of these developments, do not yet exist for Finnish building typologies. Nevertheless, this study’s findings provide a preliminary understanding of how different mechanisms of urban development, such as construction and demolition, shape environmental strains and support the development of pinpoint circular strategies.

Assessing the Carbon Impacts of Five Apartment Buildings with Different Timber Frames

Ninni Westerholm — 2024-08-15

The market share of wooden multi-story residential buildings has experienced rapid growth in Finland over the past decade, and this trend is expected to persist due to the nation’s ambitious climate goals. Finland intends to regulate construction via Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) requirements in the construction permit process by the year 2026 and is currently in the process of establishing carbon budgets. This paper compares the LCA results of five recently constructed residential multi-story timber buildings with a conventional concrete building and current climate goals.

The selected timber buildings encompass various construction methods and timber usage. The LCA adheres to the methodology established by the Ministry of the Environment Finland and utilizes the national co2data database developed for the permit application process. The chosen timber-framed buildings exhibit 16-27% lower total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 28-36% lower embodied GHG emissions compared to the concrete building. Still, these results highlight that current timber-based construction methods are insufficient to achieve current climate goals and that further development of multi-story timber buildings is still necessary.

The embodied emissions account for the majority, 54-58% of the total whole-life emissions of the timber buildings. In the timber buildings, most emissions originate from materials other than timber. The intermediate floors and walls present the most significant decarbonization potential, as they contribute to 43-59% of the embodied emissions. The paper shows the distribution of emissions across various life cycle stages, material categories, structures, and building components. Consequently, it sheds light on carbon-intensive structures and material layers that need further refinement to meet the carbon targets driven by climate change mitigation.

Making (A)mends

Sofie Pelsmakers — 2024-08-15

In October 2022, the 14th ATUT symposium Making (A)mends was held at the Tampere School of Architecture. Making (A)mends plays on the word ‘mend’ and to ‘amend’; to mend in the sense of repairing or restoring something, but also in the sense of redeveloping and putting something back together. ‘Amending’ is about improving, changing, adapting, and putting ourselves on a new path.

At the time of the conference, we had just come out of a two-year COVID pandemic of lockdowns and little face to face contact. It made visible the positive impact we have on each other and that we need each other as fellow human beings, but it also became visible – when we slowed down and gave back the city to nature – how nature and non-humans were able to take up that space. For a short time, we could glimpse a different kind of planet.

Yet climate records continue to be broken around the world: hottest temperatures, longest heatwaves, worst droughts ever recorded; extreme and record flooding and rainfall. And we are guilty of contributing to this: architecture and built environment projects continue to exploit, disrupt and damage the planet.

We also witnessed war and conflict, and this showed how we are deeply interconnected as humans to each other but also to our environment. It shows that a better, more sustainable, inclusive and restorative world is not possible without peace.

Fixing the climate, biodiversity and security crises we face as a society are extraordinarily complex and challenging tasks. Research has shown that radical transformations of our physical, political, organisational, social and value structures are needed to respond to – and prepare for – these crises and to restore the past damage that our activities and (in)activities in the built environment have inflicted. Architecture and urban planning have a fundamental role to play in this, given the long ‘lock-in’ of the urban plans and spaces and places we are part of designing and their potential (negative and positive) impacts over time with the associated local and global (in)justices they create.

This special issue provides several different perspectives on ‘Making (A)mends’ to address how we can and must be part of the solution and raises at times uncomfortable questions about our own role, responsibility and values as architects and urban planners, how we got here, and how we can make (a)mends, urgently.