Description
The chapel is located in the centre of Helsinki, near the main railway station, on a site that until the turn of the millennium was nothing but urban wasteland. Prior to the building of Juhani Pallasmaa’s large Kamppi shopping centre in 2005, with its underground traffic hub and adjoining residential and office buildings, the site was one of those seemingly “eternal temporary solutions” used as a gigantic parking lot for busses. As part of the redesign of the Kamppi area, a competition was launched for a sacred building where people should be able to find a “space of silence” in the busiest part of the city centre. The project was awarded to K2S Architects for a wooden volume whose curvature is also structurally innovative. The chapel, which dominates the east side of Narinkka Square, has 70 seats and is visited daily by around 2000 people, although there are no church services or other sacred ceremonies.
The striking building is divided into two parts. Its massive base, pushed into the sloping granite terrain, is made of reinforced concrete and opens onto the square by means of a glass wall in which the main entrance lies. The organically shaped volume of the chapel rises out of this base. The supporting structure is a construction of solid, glulam timber beams milled into curved shapes. On the outside, this framework is clad with horizontal spruce slats that have been bent to various radii and stained with wax. The inner shell, an analogously curved inner wall, consists of thick oiled planks of alder. The 11½-metre-high room is illuminated from above by a slot that separates the ceiling from the walls, a solution that recalls Tadao Ando’s 1995 meditation room on the UNESCO site in Paris. The aesthetic and olfactory effect of the wooden shell of the chapel invites inner contemplation and creates an island of peace in the hustle and bustle of the outside world. Staff from the Lutheran parish and the municipal social welfare office run the chapel together and are available on site to provide assistance and counselling where required, especially as the quarter around the main railway station has become a social hotspot.
Drawings
Ground floor plan, scale 1:500
Section, scale 1:500
Façade section, scale 1:100
Photos
Exterior view
Interior view