Mikael
16-08-2005, 15:55
This is a competition entry for a new area in Turku in Finland. The Brief called for new developments on a hill, which is pretty much located in the city, and that today has three prisons on it. The intention is that the correctional facilities will in due time be moved elsewhere, thus justifying a new approach to the old prison buildings and a further development of the site.
The aim of the competition was to find alternative uses for the prison buildings and to build quite extensive amounts of new housing.
This turned out to be quite a lot of work for us. We are not very happy with the result since there were a lot of technical issues to resolve, something that became an almost impossible task for two people. Things like parking, vehicular access, fire restrictions, heritage and more really put a limit to our creativity, and resolving these things (normally left to expertise) took too much time and effort.
However, our main concept was to make sure that this rather steep hill became accessible for pedestrians and vehicles, something that today is rather limited. There is only two ways up by car, and they are not particularly easy to find or to get up on. Since there has only been prisons up there, the limited access has probably been something that has been wanted, but it causes big problems when you all of a sudden want people to get up there.
Our main “clou” was to create a pedestrian link from the very popular promenade along the river up to the hill. We saw this as a strength to get direct access from a main pedestrian zone. It had to be easy to get up there, otherwise no one would bother. This however meant that we ended up outside of the competition area.
We also proposed a series of activities for the old prison buildings such as hotels, hostel, conference centre and housing. In addition to this we also proposed new residential buildings such as single houses, row houses and apartments. The buildings were something that we never really had time to go into, and are therefore rather conceptual.
Anyway, it is a gigantic project, it is hard to explain all the details, but if you have any questions, I will do my best to answer.
Needless to say, we didn’t win, not even a mention. This was not really expected either considering the complexity of the task. It was a good learning experience though, and a project that pushed Sketch Up and us to its limits. The site was roughly 1 by 3 km all in one model.
Starting of with an image of the site. The Prison buildings are the large buildings that sits on the green hill.
The aim of the competition was to find alternative uses for the prison buildings and to build quite extensive amounts of new housing.
This turned out to be quite a lot of work for us. We are not very happy with the result since there were a lot of technical issues to resolve, something that became an almost impossible task for two people. Things like parking, vehicular access, fire restrictions, heritage and more really put a limit to our creativity, and resolving these things (normally left to expertise) took too much time and effort.
However, our main concept was to make sure that this rather steep hill became accessible for pedestrians and vehicles, something that today is rather limited. There is only two ways up by car, and they are not particularly easy to find or to get up on. Since there has only been prisons up there, the limited access has probably been something that has been wanted, but it causes big problems when you all of a sudden want people to get up there.
Our main “clou” was to create a pedestrian link from the very popular promenade along the river up to the hill. We saw this as a strength to get direct access from a main pedestrian zone. It had to be easy to get up there, otherwise no one would bother. This however meant that we ended up outside of the competition area.
We also proposed a series of activities for the old prison buildings such as hotels, hostel, conference centre and housing. In addition to this we also proposed new residential buildings such as single houses, row houses and apartments. The buildings were something that we never really had time to go into, and are therefore rather conceptual.
Anyway, it is a gigantic project, it is hard to explain all the details, but if you have any questions, I will do my best to answer.
Needless to say, we didn’t win, not even a mention. This was not really expected either considering the complexity of the task. It was a good learning experience though, and a project that pushed Sketch Up and us to its limits. The site was roughly 1 by 3 km all in one model.
Starting of with an image of the site. The Prison buildings are the large buildings that sits on the green hill.