A new logbook entry is out. The text is the third in a series of logs covering our Grassroots City -project. Read the text on our Substack via this link.
In need of architectural services? We can help you with the following:
1. HERITAGE ↗
2. PARTICIPATION ↗
3. STORYTELLING ↗
| We are surrounded by the ordinary. Unlike older buildings shaped by craft traditions and layered histories of use, much of today’s built environment is defined by repetition and banality. To us in the words of Charlotte Malterre-Bartes: “everything is heritage”. Our work within the framework of the existing built environment includes: |
Architecture is often seen as the creation of the architect alone. However, architecture is a collaborative endeavour, drawing on diverse labour – from design contributions by architects and engineers to the efforts of construction workers, maintenance staff, cleaners, and restoration architects, all of whom play vital roles in the creation and upkeep of the built environment.
The exhibition traces the story of the Pavilion of Finland, designed by architect Alvar Aalto and his office, from its construction in 1956, through three major restorations and decades of continuous maintenance, to today. It delves into the labour required to ensure the longevity of architecture and positions the people involved in this work as co-creators alongside the original architect.
Through immersive multi-channel video projections and sound art, the exhibition brings to life the memories embedded within the pavilion’s walls. Through these stories, the exhibition invites visitors to see the space from new perspectives and uncovers aspects that are typically hidden.
Preserving built heritage depends on stewardship – a shared duty between architects and non-architects, requiring the negotiation of land, resources, and the built environment and considering the needs of humans and non-humans alike. The Pavilion – Architecture of Stewardship aspires to make the invisible visible.
The exhibition is comissioned & produced by Archinfo Finland
Curated by Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä
Video art by Merle Karp
Sound design by Jussi Hertz
Exhibition architecture by Antti Auvinen
Graphic design by Samuli Saarinen
THE PAVILION OF FINLAND IN PRESS
YLE Kulttuuriykkönen
Dezeen
The Guardian
NSS Magazine
Architecture Today
Stirworld
Designboom
Wallpaper
Archdaily
Rondine
World Architecture
The exhibition is accompanied by an independent publication Architecture of Stewardship. By recounting the Pavilion’s history, this book illustrates that buildings are not static objects but dynamic processes influenced by human actions, global politics and non-human forces. The collection of essays offers perspectives on stewardship from Finnish and Italian contributors in academia, practice, and activism, and explores how people have stewarded land, resources, and communities throughout the Pavilion’s history and its Venetian context.
Editors and Authors
Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä
Contributors
Stefano Ferro, Lodovica Guarnieri, Jonas Malmberg, Ila Narjus, Essi Nisonen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Veronica Pecile, Sofie Pelsmakers, Margherita Scapin, Carolyn Smith, Gianni Talamini, Federica Toninello
Graphic Design
Samuli Saarinen
Published by
Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing in collaboration with Archinfo – Information Centre for Finnish Architecture
ISBN 978-91-89270-97-8
MERIRASTI MULTIFUNCTIONAL BUILDING COMPETITION
In the spring of 2024, we collaborated with landscape architect Kaisla Rahkola on an architectural competition for a new multipurpose building in East Helsinki’s Meri-Rastila neighborhood. The project aimed to integrate a school, daycare center, and youth center while balancing new construction with the thoughtful reuse of existing structures.
With support from FEMMA Planning, we held workshops with residents and school staff to assess the strengths and challenges of the current buildings. These sessions helped envision how the new complex could best serve its users.
Our proposal focused on preserving the site’s existing buildings, connecting them with extensions while demolishing only the janitor’s house for new functions.
The yard design honored natural features, preserving trees, the forest floor, and open rock areas while repurposing playground equipment. Rooftop play spaces, a public path from Fokkatori to Haruspuisto, and a rooftop garden enhanced community access.
LA BOCA DEL ESPOLÓN
La Boca del Espolón is an audio installation proposal for the Concéntrico Festival 2026. It gathers the voices and sounds that shape Logroño today: spoken stories, ambient sounds, and the presence of more-than-human life.
During the festival, the recordings are played through a wooden structure shaped like an oversized horn, functioning as an analogue loudspeaker. Visitors are invited to approach, sit, rest, and listen—encountering the city through sound.
The installation enters into dialogue with one of the Paseo del Espolón’s most recognisable landmarks: the Concha del Espolón. Designed by Jaime Carceller and inaugurated in 1954, this shell-shaped auditorium—modelled on a similar structure in San Francisco—has hosted generations of concerts, from military bands to popular music, embedding sound in the civic life of Logroño. Conceived as a contemporary counterpart, La Boca del Espolón mirrors its acoustic role while shifting the focus from performance to attentive listening.
Our participatory practices include:
Cité internationale des arts
We worked in the residency of the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris September to December 2025.
The project studied the lived experience in the Parisian grands ensembles: postwar housing complexes built primarily during Les Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) as symbols of progress and housing for all, later burdened by neglect and stigma.
Because these neighbourhoods occupy a sensitive place in public discourse, we adopted drawing as our primary method. Many residents prefer not to be photographed, and drawing—slow, public, and conversational—invites curiosity and exchange. Rather than fleeting images, it demands time and presence, treating these postwar complexes as monuments in their own right.
From September to December 2025 we visited over 20 grands ensembles around the Paris metropolitan area. Seeking sustained engagement with a single site, we chose Sarcelles, a northern suburb thirty minutes from central Paris on the RER D. Built between 1954 and 1976, Sarcelles is one of France’s most emblematic grands ensembles.
The project’s culmination was a series of drawing workshops where we worked with local residents—imigrant women and young men—to help them tell their own stories through drawing. The project was conducted in collaboration with local organizations Accueil & Culture and Compagnons Bâtisseurs with Iranian dramaturg Elahe Nouri collaborating with us in the workshops. The work was exhibited at Cité Internationale des Arts in December 2025. The project was funded by the Finnish Culture Fund and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
The project studied the lived experience in the Parisian grands ensembles: postwar housing complexes built primarily during Les Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) as symbols of progress and housing for all, later burdened by neglect and stigma.
Because these neighbourhoods occupy a sensitive place in public discourse, we adopted drawing as our primary method. Many residents prefer not to be photographed, and drawing—slow, public, and conversational—invites curiosity and exchange. Rather than fleeting images, it demands time and presence, treating these postwar complexes as monuments in their own right.
From September to December 2025 we visited over 20 grands ensembles around the Paris metropolitan area. Seeking sustained engagement with a single site, we chose Sarcelles, a northern suburb thirty minutes from central Paris on the RER D. Built between 1954 and 1976, Sarcelles is one of France’s most emblematic grands ensembles.
The project’s culmination was a series of drawing workshops where we worked with local residents—imigrant women and young men—to help them tell their own stories through drawing. The project was conducted in collaboration with local organizations Accueil & Culture and Compagnons Bâtisseurs with Iranian dramaturg Elahe Nouri collaborating with us in the workshops. The work was exhibited at Cité Internationale des Arts in December 2025. The project was funded by the Finnish Culture Fund and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
First piloted in the FCINY residency in New York, the climate game is an ongoing participatory method that we use to collect and share insights about community resilience in our contemporary cities facing the effects of climate change.
The residency culminated in a workshop, where we shared insights from our exploration of community-based practices in New York City’s climate adaptation. Participants were invited to envision ways to reshape their surroundings, drawing inspiration from community-led initiatives such as community-based organizations, community gardens, and landmarks like Cooper Square, home to New York’s first community land trust.
We mapped local knowledge of extreme weather events in a workshop titled “Let’s Talk About Weather”. The workshop was part of the Mellunmäki neighborhood celebration in May 2025 organized in collaboration with Mellunmäki-liike, Kalliolan Setlementti and ME-talo.
Design practice Raivio&Bumann commissioned us to facilitate a participatory workshop for children and young people as part of their placemaking project in Meri-Rastila, East Helsinki. We invited the local youth to imagine their dream neighborhood through collages.
The participants explored the cityscape with a focus on play, socializing with friends, and self-expression. Through the anecdotes shared during the workshop, we gained valuable insights into how the youth perceive their neighborhood.
We discovered that places for play can be found in the most unexpected spots: at the locally famous climbing tree, in the breeze from an AC unit on the side of the local mall, or at the cliffs where friends gather to meet up.
Raivio&Bumann gathered and synthesized the findings from the workshop, using them as valuable insights to inform city planning in the area. The workshop was part of the Meri-Rastila block party, and the finished collages were exhibited at the local cultural center, Merirasti.
We hosted a workshop as part of the Meri-Rastila Block Party 2025, where locals were invited to write post cards from their favorite places in the neighborhood. In the postcards residents shared their memories of these places and put into words what the significance of their everyday environment.
The workshop was part of the Geography of Memories project funded by Alfred Kordelin Foundation and City of Helsinki.
Inspired by the work of the French situationist movement we hosted a workshop utilising psychogeographic methods. The residents of Meri-Rastila were invited to draw memory maps that showcased the neighborhood not through exact cartography, but though the memories and meanings that places hold in peoples’ lives.
The workshop was part of the Geography of Memories project funded by Alfred Kordelin Foundation and City of Helsinki.
In the spring of 2024, we collaborated with landscape architect Kaisla Rahkola on an architectural competition for a new multipurpose building in East Helsinki’s Meri-Rastila neighborhood. The project aimed to integrate a school, daycare center, and youth center while balancing new construction with the thoughtful reuse of existing structures.
With support from FEMMA Planning, we held workshops with residents and school staff to assess the strengths and challenges of the current buildings. These sessions helped envision how the new complex could best serve its users.
As part of our storytelling practice we:
What role do local communities play in urban development amid market-driven forces? How can communities act as active agents in response to climate-driven extreme weather events? These are some of the questions explored in Grassroots City, a two-year research and art project focused on the role of local communities in socially and ecologically sustainable urban development.
As climate change forces cities to adapt to rising sea levels and extreme weather, it is essential for city dwellers to be central in shaping climate-resilient urban spaces. The project aims to spark discussion on the resources and resilience of local communities in a changing world, examining the history, present, and future of community-based urban development. It also addresses the challenges and opportunities created by today’s urban dynamics, including the financialization and entrepreneurialization of real estate markets. The project is funded by the Arts Promotion Center.
You can study the results of the project (in Finnish) via this link↗
As climate change forces cities to adapt to rising sea levels and extreme weather, it is essential for city dwellers to be central in shaping climate-resilient urban spaces. The project aims to spark discussion on the resources and resilience of local communities in a changing world, examining the history, present, and future of community-based urban development. It also addresses the challenges and opportunities created by today’s urban dynamics, including the financialization and entrepreneurialization of real estate markets. The project is funded by the Arts Promotion Center.
You can study the results of the project (in Finnish) via this link↗
Cité internationale des arts
The Grand [Ensemble] Tour is an art and research project developed during a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in the fall of 2025.
Reimagining the traditional Grand Tour—once a journey to the ruins of antiquity—the project turns its attention to the Parisian grands ensembles: postwar housing complexes built primarily during Les Trente Glorieuses (1945–1975) as symbols of progress and housing for all, later burdened by neglect and stigma.
Because these neighbourhoods occupy a sensitive place in public discourse, we adopted drawing as our primary method. Many residents prefer not to be photographed, and drawing—slow, public, and conversational—invites curiosity and exchange. Rather than fleeting images, it demands time and presence, treating these postwar complexes as monuments in their own right.
The project was funded by the Finnish Culture Fund and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and was done in collaboration with local organizations Accueil & Culture and Compagnons Bâtisseurs. Its culmination was a series of drawing workshops in Sarcelles, organised with dramaturg Elaheh Nouri. The work was exhibited at Cité internationale des arts in December 2025
Built between 1954 and 1976, Sarcelles is one of France’s most emblematic grands ensembles. By the early 1960s, however, Sarcelles had given its name to sarcellite, signifying the malaise of living in the large housing estates, becoming a media anti-model and a shorthand for the failures of large housing estates.
Today, Sarcelles—like many postwar districts—is undergoing large-scale renewal. Framed as social and environmental improvement, these processes often prioritise demolition over repair, with social housing disappearing faster than it is replaced.
Yet Sarcelles has always been more complex than its reputation allows. It remains a deeply diverse neighbourhood, where many families have lived for generations and dozens of languages and cultures coexist. Neighbours meet regularly, most visibly in the market that takes over the area several times a week. Against decades of stigma, Sarcelles’ identity continues to be shaped through everyday life, shared space, and collective presence. The drawing workshops sought to find and give form to these lived values of the neighbourhood.
Geography of Memories is an art and research project where together with local residents we gathered memories and the intangible values embedded in the neighborhood of Meri-Rastila. As the area undergoes significant changes due to urban renewal, major buildings—from schools to the local mall—are being demolished to make way for new constructions.
Through our approach, we aimed to inspire a new way of observing the built environment—not just through abstract maps and planners’ drawings, but through the personal significance places and spaces hold in people’s lives. The project invited us to engage with the history of map-making and reflect on the power that the lines drawn by architects carry. Even if the demolition driven by urban renewal cannot be halted, we can preserve the memories embedded in the built environment and the silent knowledge held by the area’s residents.
The results of the Geography of Memories project were exhibited in Culture Space Merirasti in August 2025. The site specific exhibition adopted its form from the former chapel hall. On the wall of, in the place of the altarpiece, hung a memory map that compiled information about the memories of Meri-Rastila: past and present significant places for which locals have struggled. The altar table was covered by fourteen stacks of A4-papers. The A4 represents the systems of standardization that guide our daily lives and aim to enact control over the human experience. The stacks of paper symbolized the myriad of surveys conducted of Meri-Rastila, and comprised the final publication of the project in the form of a deconstructed book that aimed to showcase what surveys conducted of the social life of neighborhoods could look like.
The project is funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the City of Helsinki.
11/1/2026 The Grand [Ensemble] Tour
10/6/2025 The Wooden Shack Among World Powers
2/5/2025 Practicing Attentiveness
29/3/2025 Community Matters
21/2/2025 Fixer’s Folklore
Meri-Rastila
18/07/2025 Idea of Rastila by the Sea
07/10/2025 Pro Meri-Rastila’s Advocacy Work (Article by residents’ movement Pro Meri-Rastila)
29/9/2025 From Collecting Opinions to Increasing Understanding (Article by Moona Tikka)
8/4/2024 Simple Suffices
27/10/2023 Hidden Sanctuaries
19/10/2023 Cultural Space Merirasti
12/6/2023 Temporary Buildings on Rental Lots
25/10/2022 Beyond Repair?
25/10/2022 An Endangered Landmark
24/9/2023 Yearning for Roots
5/9/1989 History of a Neighborhood
18/8/2023 It's all so Secretive
New York
04/02/2023 Managed Retreat
02/08/1962 Preservation Beyond Landmarks
04/02/2023 Real Estate on Shaky Ground
15/11/2023 Billion Dollar Flooding
14/11/2023 It’s All About Real Estate
13/02/1970 Community Control Over Land
27/11/2023 Reimagining Infrastructure
16/11/2023 Organizing for Environmental Justice
25/11/2023 Urban Homesteading Movement
9/11/2023 Striving for Collective Resiliency
7/11/2023 Guerrilla Gardening
4/11/2023 Stories of a Different Time
18/2/2026 The Red Locomotive Remembers
4/2/2026 Enduring Urban Renewal
23/01/2026 Grassroots City
2/7/2025 When Biden Came to Town, even the Concrete Barriers were Repainted (Interview with Helsinki Municipal Construction Services Enterprise Stara)
5/2025 Archinfo & Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing
Architecture of Stewardship
8/2024 Archinfo
Savouring slowness
5/2023 Finnish Architectural Review
Halting New Construction – Interview with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
5/2023 Finnish Architectural Review
Revisit: Vuoranta Training Centre
2/2023 Finnish Architectural Review
The Local Community Heals
1/2023 Finnish Architectural Review
Social Movements, Saviors of Built Heritage?
11/2025 Finnish Architectural Review
The New Wave
6/2025 Archinfo
Finnish Architects in the Spotlight: Vokal
2/2025 Archinfo
Pavilion of Finland’s exhibition explores architecture as a collaborative endeavour through the iconic Aalto-designed Pavilion
3/2024 Archinfo
Young Finnish architects Ella Kaira and Matti Jänkälä to curate the Pavilion of Finland at the 2025 Biennale Architettura
3/2024 Withstanding Podcast
On Community Activism
1/2024 Archinfo
Residency work opens up new perspectives and opportunities to build international networks
12/2023 Finnish Cultural Institute in New York
Interview: Ella Kaira and Matti Jänkälä on the soft side of architecture
vokal(@)vokal.fi
Ella Kaira
Architect (MSc) SAFA
ella.kaira(@)vokal.fi
Matti Jänkälä
Architect (MSc) SAFA
matti.jankala(@)vokal.fi
Follow us on Substack @vokalprojekt
Follow us on Instagram @vokal.projekt