Across three buildings along a waterfront in Herttoniemi, Neitoniemi offers housing and a day-care centre.
Housing
Two buildings contain an exceptionally versatile distribution of apartments, from small two-room units to five-room row-house-like homes.
One of the special features of this project is the 2+2 level row house wing. Lower apartments are on the ground floor with a double-height living room and bedrooms upstairs. The upper apartments have a reverse solution; the access corridor is on the top floor level and the bedrooms are downstairs. Here too the living room has a higher ceiling. All apartments have full-height balcony glazing. Another feature at the time was the use of lightweight concrete blocks in the plastered external walls of these four-story buildings.
Day-care centre
“This privately owned English-speaking day-care centre was built on a curved site in the middle of a residential block. In the town plan the area was reserved for dwellings, but the complex shape of the site and its location behind apartment buildings raised questions about its suitability for this purpose. However, the site and its location were ideal for a day-care centre: it would have a courtyard of its own without causing inconvenience to the residents.
Because of its flexibility, timber was selected as the material for this round building with a conical ceiling. The town plan stipulated that the house should be as high as a two-storey building, and as the floor plan was relatively ambitious, part of the facilities were placed on the first floor, which consists of loft-like structures. There was no room for extra columns in the relatively small rooms downstairs, so the beams that were required for the lofts were suspended from the roof using steel bars. External walls were clad with wide horizontal boarding. The curved shape invited the use of visually distinctive vertical battening to add texture to the walls around the windows. The external surfaces and fences were treated with a tar and linseed oil-based grey wood protection agent.” –Kirsti Siven, published in Killingin PK Puulehti
Year: 2000
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Team: Asko Takala, Kirsti Siven, Liisa Noponen, Arja Lukin, Karola Sahi, Eija Anttila, Tapani Lehtinen
