Revisiting the principles of the Garden City and Alvar Aalto’s design philosophy, the new school knits itself within Otaniemi to enrich the existing dynamics of the area with a wealth of opportunities for social interactions. The keystone of this approach is the Mesh, a three dimensional structure that playfully articulates the social and teaching spaces, blurring boundaries between the interior and exterior, between viewing and making, between knowledge and action.
This Mesh extends between the different buildings on site, to unify existing and new faculties and weave together the surrounding public spaces with multi level circulations. Guiding users into the site and through its entrance atriums, the Mesh hosts a spectrum of meeting points of various scales that multiply the points of interaction with the action zones of the campus and the new vibrant square that it frames.
The new central square wraps around Aalto’s Main Building and Library, placing these iconic building at the heart of the campus. Its auditorium is strengthened as the main visual navigation landmark of the site: the new buildings laid out on the site to ensure that it remains visible from all approaches to the square. The site layout is clearly readable from the central square to allow easy visual navigation for visitors and campus users. The subtle interplay of hard and soft landscaping along the pedestrian and cycle axes on the square offer multiple highly accessible routes to the common facilities surrounding it.
To the west, the central square merges into the experimental courtyard, a large sheltered space located at the inflexion point of the Mesh. This transient spaces overflow with the activities of creative studios and workshops of the Design, Art and Architecture faculties, overlapping onto it to bring together the different disciplines of the school and foster collaboration and interaction.
The Mesh reaches out to this point to guide the public into the courtyard from the west entrance and links the square with the Lume theatre complex and the Media faculty, located close to the future Film Town on the north boundary of the site.
To the east, the square converges towards the main pedestrian and cycling route across the site, along the lime trees and through the lawns of Alvarin aukio. At this key point of the site fans out the social hub for the whole campus, with the new multi-modal transport hub of the metro station, combined with several restaurants and shops, the school’s Learning Centre and its public exhibition spaces and the central administration building.
From the experimental courtyard radiates the Mesh that creates a rich network of circulations and social spaces along the facades of the school buildings.Their north facades offer vertical surfaces with balconies linking the indoor spaces to the playful and sheltered multi-level circulations of the Mesh. In contrast, the south facades are more sculpted, stepping up into multiple elevated garden terraces to take advantage of their southern exposure.
These hanging gardens extend the building’s social spaces, blurring providing intimate and lively collaboration spaces conducive to alternative ways of teaching, These spaces where social interaction meet knowledge sharing are accessible both from within the building and the Mesh, whose platforms tuck against the facade to filter solar gains.
