Architecture | A “vintage” apartment building was built in Helsinki, which makes passers-by sigh with delight

Helsinki An exceptional apartment building is going up in Oulunkylä, the likes of which has not been built in the capital region for possibly a hundred years. The house is new, but built as an “old-time” house.

“Vintage”, sums it up Raimo J. Kumpu admiring the house on the street.

The house has several very exceptional features in this time.

One is that it has solid brick walls. Twenty masons have laid each brick individually in place with their own hands. The walls of new houses are usually built completely differently, for example from concrete elements.

The house also differs from the mainstream of modern construction in terms of ventilation, which is gravity-driven and not mechanical.

“We thought about what good features of the old house we could bring to the new house,” says the partner and architect Niilo Ikonen Architect office from Avarrus.

As original the idea was that the house would have been completely bricked.

However, entire apartment buildings have not been bricked on construction sites for decades, and the know-how didn’t really exist when the building was planned a few years ago.

The authors decided on an alternative solution, on the one hand to reduce risks, and on the other hand, due to scheduling reasons. Now the building is supported by a concrete column slab frame and the brick walls that are about sixty centimeters thick around it.

So there is nothing but brick in the walls. It lacks different insulation layers. The structure is of the same type as in the old houses in the center of Helsinki, whose brick wall stores heat and warms the air coming from outside.

During the construction, to the surprise of the creators, it turned out that brick masonry would probably have become even cheaper and faster than the now chosen hybrid technology.

“Brickwork is not as slow as imagined,” says Avarrus’ second partner architect Pauli Siponen.

Helsinki The house called Muurarimestari will be completed at the corner of Mestarintie and Käskynhaltijantie, along the light rail route, in the spring of 2024.

It is part of the City of Helsinki’s Developing apartment building program, which aims to improve the quality of living in apartment buildings and develop construction.

A short distance away, on the other side of Käskynhaltijantie, the city’s first is planned log apartment building, which belongs to the same program. There are forty apartment building projects in total.

According to Siposen, in the pilot site of Oulunkylä, the intention is not only to make a high-rise apartment building in the renovation style, although such an idea of ​​a brick building with a mansard roof easily comes to mind.

He specifies that the comforts of living are not compromised at the expense of the old construction method. In Oulunkylä, the quality can be seen in the floor plans of the apartments.

“There has been a lot of talk about pipe units and chicken coops. There won’t be any of them here.”

In a house there are just under thirty apartments, ranging from studios to five-room apartments. The average size is about sixty square meters.

All apartments open to at least two air directions. For example, the studios are located in the corners of the building, and there are also smaller two-room apartments that extend through the building. The windows of even small apartments can therefore be seen in several directions.

The long balcony zone faces the courtyard on the south side.

According to the authors, the materials have been chosen ecologically and sustainably. For example, waste bricks have also been used in masonry. It can be seen, for example, in one of the chimneys, which is bricked with different colored bricks.

Plastic has been avoided as much as possible. It could not have been completely avoided. Plastic will be used in the base material of the parquet and in the vapor barriers of the wooden upper floor.

Due to ecology and gravity ventilation, there are no saunas in the apartments. They have been replaced by a common sauna section with its own ventilation equipment.

The building could not be connected to geothermal heat due to the tunnel reservation under the plot. That’s why the house is warmed by district heating, and it collects energy with a more than one hundred square meter solar power plant.

From his environment the unusual building also arouses the interest of passers-by.

Walking the Kira dog Nele-Liis Tent lives nearby and passes a house under construction every day. The house pleases his eyes.

“All new houses look the same. It reminds me of an old house. Construction is probably expensive when it’s done by hand,” he says.

In Tenti’s opinion, there could be more such houses that stand out from the crowd, but the temperatures in the apartments are disturbing when the walls are nothing but bricks. He wonders if the apartments have fireplaces. Is not.

Art photographer Raimo J. Kumpu follows the progress of the construction works opposite the house.

“Oulunkylä throw-in product. This aims to increase the appreciation of the area. That’s the purpose here,” he commented.

Kumpu describes the house as vintage looking a hundred years old, which reminds him of the former home in Töölö, built at the beginning of the 20th century.

Analysis is right, because the model of the house is exactly the stone houses of the 1920s.

“I really like that this kind of architecture is coming back. It’s good that the vintage style has been invented. Previously, it was done cheaply and quickly. Now we can do it better with more money.”

Pram pusher Annika Lesch-Wallinn says that he admires the house every time he walks past it.

“A nice change. I’m tired of modern architecture. There are terrible prefab houses in this area too.”

However, Lesch-Wallin startles when he hears the heavy ventilation. He says he lived in a 1970s house that had one, and he didn’t like it.

Those who live in the small house area of ​​Pakila would still not be bothered, even if such a house were built in their own neighborhood.