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House for three generations
United Kingdom Architecture News - Apr 13, 2014 - 12:26 1928 views
Tuomas Siitonen previously worked on interiors and urban strategies. He learned the art of designing for demanding clients through assignments at experienced architecture studios. His first completed building is a house that has also been selected for the Museum of Finnish Architecture's biannual top architecture exhibition, which opens this summer.
'A friend and his family were building a house in Oulunkylä, about fifteen minutes by local train from the centre of Helsinki. They had made other enquiries, but ended up giving the commission to me. It was time to start my own office.
This family, involved in the performing arts, and with their parents living in an old wooden villa on the same plot of land, were ideal "customers". When I presented them with my first sketches, they wanted something more courageous, in a way more avant-garde; not anything too exclusive, but a home for the family of four and an extra apartment for the grandmother.
House for three generations, Helsinki (Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo)
House for three generations, Helsinki (Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo)
House for three generations, Helsinki (Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo)
The area's urban plan had been made in the 1970s and contained the possibility to build a new house with close to around 400 square metres. We settled for 170 "official" square metres, while preserving the existing building of around 200 square metres. We placed the entrance, sauna, adjoining dressing room and the small apartment on the ground floor of the new building and the family quarters above it.
My time in Spain [as a student, ed.] was important in the sense that there I learned to use working models. We did a lot of that in this project as well, to create the final shape and look of the building, which is clad in Siberian larch wood…'
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