In 2016, Helsinki produced a city plan designed to prevent urban sprawl. It designated Verkkosaari, the former docklands to the northeast of the city center, as a new area for development. A subsequent document defined a site at its heart for the Urban Environment House: an integrated home for the planning, housing, and environmental departments, previously spread out across Helsinki. That detailed document specified a skewed L-shaped building that would enclose two sides of a city block to form an internal courtyard with a neighboring structure. It required the building be set back from the street on one side, to create a public space along one route in the neighborhood, and set a height of eight stories, to mediate the scale between tall residential towers on one side and a lower district of converted slaughterhouses on the other.
Designed by Finland’s preeminent architectural practice, Lahdelma & Mahlamäki (LMA), designers of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, the Urban Environment House achieves its pragmatic goal of creating enough office space for 1,500 local government employees, in a modestly scaled urban core. It also accomplishes more ambitious aims, living up to its name as a model for well-designed urban redensification, while serving as an exemplar of sustainability, as a near–net zero building.
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