Description

Northwest of Helsinki’s city centre – which faces the port – there is an area stretching along Lake Töölö which at the beginning of the twentieth century still formed the backdrop to the city. Numerous urban planning projects in the course of the century tried to give a face to the neglected district in the middle of the city that had not been affected by its growth. The idea that Alvar Aalto had in 1969 to put up a row of public buildings along the western shore of the lake now becomes reality. The new building of the Finnish media concern, Sanoma, together with the museum for modern art by Steven Holl across the way forms the striking southern end of this row. Only a park will separate the building from the lake in future, so that the nine-storey glass cube can be seen from afar. The media centre with a restaurant and design centre on the lower two floors will be part of urban life.

A diagonal intersection of pathways leads through the building and creates a suspenseful division of the square ground plan into triangles. The northern triangle forms the Media Piazza, a public square in a nine-storey high glass hall with a view of the lake. Freestanding lifts and a stairway enclosed in glass connect the upper office levels of the newspaper publisher with the special function rooms in the basement – the canteen of the publishing house, the adjoining conference rooms and the auditorium, as well as a sort of practice editorial department for schoolchildren and a fitness centre with sauna. A hole cut in the floor slab provides visual contact with them. In the pedestrian passageway, wood-panelled bridges arch through the air, interconnecting the triangular office levels.

Good communication channels and close collaboration contribute significantly to the success of a daily newspaper. Groups of workplaces distributed through the open-plan layouts facilitate this. It is only in localised areas that glazed walls offer acoustic separation for individual workplaces and small meeting rooms. For short, spontaneous meetings, staff are provided with comfortable seating areas and conference tables in the open zones. At the sunny enclosed southwest corner of the building, an angled veranda, protected from the wind by the protruding ends of the façade, offers outdoor seating.

As a second skin, glass shear walls in front of the office façades, articulated storey-wise by horizontal profile bands, offer protection from the wind and the cold. At the corridor façade, automatically controlled openings to the outside regulate the ventilation of the space between its two skins (see “The Changeable Envelope”).

On the north side, the external appearance is determined by a three-dimensional steel structure, which serves to stiffen the nine-storey high glazed façade of the hall that is suspended from it.

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Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.