Royal Academy Architectural Futures: AOR Architects

AOR Architects

AOR Architects

Statement

Since it was founded in 2015, the practice has evolved into an architecture office of ten people. AOR has won numerous prizes in national and international architecture competitions for Jätkäsaari School, Helsinki, and Tampere Art Museum Extension, Monio High School and Community Centre, Tuusula, the largest campus in Scandinavia, and Viewpoint Pavilion in Camley Street Natural Park, London.

AOR Architects aims to combine practical, social, aesthetic, economic and ecological demands into memorable architecture that is in harmony with its context. The practice has a special focus on wood construction, designing complex public buildings in demanding urban settings, as well as additions to delicate historical contexts and natural surroundings.

AOR has particular interest and expertise in the design of future learning environments for the world-renowned Finnish national curriculum. AOR aims to design the best schools in the world in order to create inspiring platforms for phenomenon-based education which enables pupils to gain a broad understanding of the world.

In addition to building design, the portfolio of AOR includes urban design and planning, with projects ranging from small urban interventions to large-scale city plans. As part of the Nordic Works Collective, AOR promotes participatory design methods that aim to make cities better by working together with residents, municipalities, companies and other parties. AOR values the skills of traditional craftsmanship which are a core part of their work, as seen on the accompanying models, showing details of three projects featured in this book.

AOR Architects

Jätkäsaari School

Helsinki, Finland 2019 Left: Concrete model

Jätkäsaari comprehensive school of 800 pupils in Helsinki is the latest evolution in contemporary Finnish school design. It is one of the first school buildings designed entirely in accordance with Finland’s new national curriculum, which focuses on phenomenonbased and multidisciplinary learning. The building not only functions as a school but also as a community centre for the inhabitants of the new city district. It plays an important role in creating an identity for the new area. It is visible from afar with an open view to the Baltic Sea. The block-like building stands out in the cityscape and at the same time adapts to the surrounding urban structure.

The school activities happening in and visible from the atrium create communality and a sense of belonging among pupils of different ages. The open and flexible spaces encourage children to learn and collaborate. The organisation of the building initiates cooperation between subject departments and grade levels. It encourages people to move and use the whole building for learning. Transparent and generous spaces allow pupils to choose their own paths inside the secure school environment, encouraging individual and social growth as human beings.

In the heart of the building there is a central square, a three-storey high atrium, surrounded by learning spaces. The multifunctional atrium serves as a canteen, auditorium, assembly hall, and venue for concerts and events. The height of the atrium and the skylights enables natural light to flow into the frame of the building.

The facade is fibre reinforced white concrete, creating a varied pattern structured by windows and relief recesses. The ground floor is clad in handmade, twice-fired brick, a downto-earth material with a tangible feel. The brick surfaces continue inside, introducing the exterior to the interior.

Leikkaus A-A 1:400

Soft daylight provided by sculptural skylights makes the lobby an impressive milieu for AO R events.

Aarti Ollila Ristola Arkkitehdit Oy Liisankatu 27 F 26, Helsinki Finland www.aor.fi

Cast-in-situ staircases create a geometrically exciting space. Skylights counter-balance the interior colours.

According to the principles of the new curriculum, learning can also happen outside the classroom both individually or with other pupils. In the Jätkäsaari school, even the limited number of corridors are learning spaces. The aim was to create a building which would feel comfortable and safe (in spite of its enormous size and large number of pupils), even for the youngest children. Teachers of different subject’s plan and teach the phenomenonbased lessons together.

AOR Architects

Tampere Art Museum Extension

Tampere, Finland To be completed in 2025 Centre: Brick model

The new extension for Tampere Art Museum creates an iconic form for the museum, articulating the urban landscape between Pyynikintori square and the park surrounding the current museum.

The extension joins a series of public buildings along Pirkankatu and makes the museum more visible to the busy main street – attracting new visitors to the museum. Compact in footprint and similar in scale to the existing museum building, the new extension preserves as much as space of the park area surrounding the museum as possible. The building is a free-standing structure amidst a green public space, with strong connections to the past, present and future alike.

The ground and third floor of the five-storey extension opens to the surrounding cityscape, making the city part of the museum and the museum part of the city. The exhibition circulation of the extension continues underground to the existing museum building. The red-brick extension forms a counterpart to the existing museum building, a former grain granary, and interprets the continuum of historical industrial buildings in Tampere.

The design of the museum is developed in a close collaboration with the user. Scale models function as a fundamental tool for designing and representing architecture.

Visual and model for the Tampere Art museum

The geometry of the museum and the division of the spaces is based on a strong structural idea. All the vertical connections and technical installations are located in the concrete core, the only load bearing element in the plan. All the floors are cantilevered slabs supported from the core.

The concrete walls of the fourth floor divide the plan into multiple small galleries and simultaneously support the panoramic glass facade on the third floor without any columns.

On the ground floor, a structural concrete shell structure hovers above the lobby.

All the different floors and spaces possess their own distinct character to create an immersive visitor experience.

The usability of the exhibition floors and the ability to close them off facilitates a versatile exhibition programme and a flexible schedule.

AOR Architects

Monio High School and Community Centre

Tuusula, Finland To be completed in 2022 Right: Timber model

Monio, the new high school and community centre in Tuusula, interprets the order and vigorous spirit of the former garrison area of Hyrylä through its architecture. The building applies contemporary wood construction to traditional building methods and references the historical buildings in the area through the facade and the shape of the roof. The massive timber log school consists of five intersecting log houses that imitate the scale of the old barrack buildings.

The combination of a school and a community centre has proven to be a successful building typology. It promotes collaboration and interaction between different groups and allows people to share resources. In this type of a multi-functional, shared public building, all different user groups get more for less. Monio represents the concept of a school and a community centre through its basic solution – the building consists of five singular log houses that together form a plural. As a result, the whole becomes more than its parts.

Open and flexible lobby spaces – bordered by the massive timber log walls of the five log houses – are located in and along the threestory-high interior streets. The interior streets function as a shared learning environment for all different user groups of the building, creating places for encounters and interactions.

By combining a school building and a community centre into one building, a wide variety of functions and a greater flexibility and efficiency of use are achieved.

The design of Monio examines the architectural possibilities of industrially produced timber logs through a specific architectural expression, based on the dimensions, technical qualities, character and heritage of the building material.

The timber log wall forms both the facade material, bearing structure, insulation and interior wall surface of the building. Timber is also used for the floor slabs and columns inside the timber log walls.

AOR Architects

Lahti, Finland

Mukkula Manor Park Pavilion

2018

Located in an old manor park, the wooden pavilion offers a welcome entrance to the park and provides shelter for visitors. It is made entirely of simple 48x96mm timber planks which form an undulating complex curtain structure 17meters in length.

The structure is composed of eight elements of planks that are connected by steel bars. These elements are locked together with a finger joint in between the roof beams. Light is then filtered through the wooden beams, creating dancing patterns of light and shadow on the structure. This dynamic effect constantly changes due to different light conditions. The pavilion forms a sequence of intimate spaces that vary in size and atmosphere and the level of transparency through the structure is different depending on the viewing angle. The complex woodwork was produced by highly skilled carpenters.