Life on a Leaf- a total work of art
A short description

Have you ever wondered why among all these millions of box shaped buildings, you will never see a house shaped like a shoe, a flower or a leaf?
This is the question, which set out artist Jan-Erik Andersson on a long and adventurous journey to build his own leaf shaped house in the middle of Turku city in Finland. The house project, called Life on a Leaf, is also the art part of Andersson’s studies for a doctorate degree in visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
Andersson is exploring the possibilities of building a personal house, shaped like a leaf, as a total art work. He is interested in the way stories, written by Andersson himself, can influence the shape, the ornaments and the interior of the house.

The aesthetics of the house is departing from the Art Nouveau concept about the house as a shelter for an individual soul, opposed to the modernist concept of the house as machine for living. Can a house both be functional and fantastic, can we use contemporary computer technology to create ornaments with a meaning which stimulate people of today? Can a house, which you can live and work in, at the same time have the quality of a sculpture. How can the site’s own history inspire the new building? And is it possible to achieve all this within a decent budget?

The project also registers how the society reacts. How much personal freedom do the society give to a person, who wants to make his own dream in a world obsessed with so many regulations and restrictions?
Andersson also seeks answers to questions about the role of the architect. Can the architect function as a servant, who realizes people’s dreams, or is the architect still the person who decides what is ”good taste” or not. Life on a leaf is a collaboration between Andersson and architect Erkki Pitkäranta. As a result of ten years of collaboration they work seamlessly, throwing ideas back and forth, making stories, building small scale models and having fun.

The project will also involve collaboration with other artists and artisans, who will make details to the house, based on the stories written by Andersson. The goal is to create a total art work, which would inspire people to build their dream houses together with architects, artists and artisans.
The doctorate study consists of two parts; the building of the physical house and a documentary part which will be made directly on the Internet. Andersson’s intention is to make the study social; on the Internet anybody who likes can follow the building process, check which the problems have been and how they have been solved, along with texts about ornaments, Art Nouveau, architecture in fairy tales etc. The doctorate study will be published on the Internet in 2007, when the house is planned to be ready.

The site you visit at the moment is the Life on a Leaf house’s own web site, which contains information about the present state of the project, pictures from the process, a virtual WRML-model of the house. When the building process starts, a real time streaming video broadcast from the building sites can be seen on this web site. The performances which will be made by invited artists for the inauguration of the roof, the floor, the windows, etc. will also be broadcast on this web site.