Architecture Corner

A few things to cover this time out, and a bit long so I'll split into 3 posts below this one:

• Betonipäivää: Dipoli; Hämeenlinän arkisto; marte.marte
• Europan 10, in which we don't win
• Uusi seikkailu, or what have I been doing instead of writing blogs?

Europan

JM100: © MDD/JSK 2009 via Arkkitehdas

The author has created [a] somewhat general lay-out for the site. Despite of some positive goals the overall atmosphere and the details of the solution seem to look backwards rather that seek new solutions. There are some positive rhythmic ingredients in the repetition of the houses.

So, no, we didn't win.

If you remember way back to this post a year ago, you'll know that we were taking part in theEuropan 10 'young designers' (i.e. under-40's) competition with a proposal for the Tampere, Vuores site. That was submitted way back in July, and results were finally published this month (a day shy of a whole year since the official launch).

The winners (which you can see here - under Tulokset/Palkitutin or Eng/Results/Best Projects, and also the full jury report (in English) for both Finnish sites) were definitely a cut above our entry, so congratulations to them. We knew when we submitted that we hadn't cracked the important corner of the site, and we were never completely happy with the back edge... in fact only the terrace of houses mentioned we felt completely satisfied with. Maybe 'backward looking' terraced (row) housing is an British cultural trait coming out? More controversially, we think the winning entry (Scion) 'broke' the master plan slightly (although we may be misunderstanding the drawings), which we understood to be no-go (and had a big struggle with)... but I've heard it before - the trick is knowing which part of the brief to break to make the best competition entry.

You can see our full entry here (which gives away the next part of the post so read that first), and although damned with faint praise from the jury, it was at least categorized in the 'middle class' entries rather than the lower class. And I learnt a lot about Finnish housing, urban planning and drawing conventions in the process - which was really the main point of the exercise; that and it being my last chance to take part, as now that even as an Architect, I am no longer 'young'.

Time flies when you're having fun

Danger - Architect at work... via

What is it with architects and deadlines?

Somehow it is 10 days since our last post, although it only seems like last night. I have several things I want to blog about (including horses & cows, blood pancakes, not cycling, dentists and other random things) but we're in that mad 'draw-up' zone trying to get our Europan 10 competition entry ready, working 12 hour days redesigning everything for the n-th time, redrawing it, redesigning it again, drawing it again, re-reading the brief, starting it all again.... Having the world's worst rickety, uneven table as a drawing board, no network, flaky software and only an A4 printer (also very temperamental - rather like it's owner) doesn't exactly help. Mind you the set up is still almost as good as my last office...

The observant amongst you may be wondering why I making a big deal about this as we still have exactly a month to go, however my course starts on Monday (oh bugger I have to revise for that too), and we have Juhannus in between, and I need to get a 3d CAD model of the whole site finished next week so we can work up some perspective views then work on the written part. While Konna will only have to draw everything else! If we were doing this in an office I would hope there would be a few more hands.  Lucky it is 'only' three A1 boards... (and 10 A3's, and 2 CD's) ... and we can't even publish it here until after the judging - in January!