Meri-Rastila multipurpose building
An old school building - demolish or repair?
The City of Helsinki organized a public architectural competition to transform the Meri-Rastila school into a multipurpose community center. The intention was to develop and revitalize the area. The number of residents in the area is increasing rapidly, but its appearance is beginning to look a bit run-down. The new community center brings together the public services in the area.
The competition sought proposals to how the existing buildings from the early 1990s could be utilized in the design of the modern community center – if indeed this would be possible at all. The existing buildings have no significant architectural historical value, but from an ecological point of view, demolishing buildings that are not particularly old is problematic.
Kohteen tiedot
Preserving, modifying, supplementing and recycling the old
Our competition proposal strikes a balance between demolition and preservation. The parish building will be preserved almost in its present state. In the proposal, the one-story daycare center – inefficient from the perspective of plot use – would be demolished. The old school building will be mostly spared yet extensively expanded to the yard side. The concrete facades to be dismantled will be reused in their present form as the facades of the extensions.
Building’s exterior architecture was shaped into two sides. From the outside of the block, the community center appears as a light-colored, modernist concrete building with the original, recycled facades. On the yard side, a new wooden facade winds organically at the edge of the nearby forest and around the rocks. Spatially, the building forms a "path of learning" that begins in kindergarten and ends in secondary school.
