2/8 Perhaps if I would have been living in another country, where the
contradiction
wouldn’t be as sharp as in Finland I would never have started
to ask these questions. In a country where they respect old buildings
and
where the new buildings have a more organic and human touch,
I would have continued with my “normal” artistic
activity.But I stuck my head into it, to a whole new world, and
now I even find
myself building
my own
house to try to test my vision.
But before we get there, please let me make a trip back in time and and
stop now and then to visit some of my ideas.
What is architecture and what is not? Can the shelters built instinctively
and functionally by animals be called architecture. This project
shows my version of a bird’s nest.
What distinguishes
this from a real bird’s nest is that although it looks
totally chaotic, it is made of the same module, a triangle made
of wooden sticks.
Architects will note
the subtle comment on the concept of building around a module.
Instead of screaming baby birds this nest was filled with babbling
exhibition
guests, sitting around three tables drinking coffee.
Another version of the bird’s nest was installed in an old church
ruin in central Berlin. People could go into the nest and sit down to listen
to sound artist Shawn Decker’s sound installation.
Can you live in Coffee Cup? Can a coffee cup be called architecture?
At least you can make house which looks like a coffee cup.
This house
is built
of Finnish ingredients. We like to drink coffee, the design of
the cup is from a famous Finnish designer Kaj Franck, who designed
the Teema (Kilta)
cup
in the fifties. It has become an icon for the scandinavian minimalist
design. In Finland they can be bought in every supermarket and
can be found in
every house. In USA they are expensive design objects.
The
doorknob and the window frame is x-shaped like a Lotto cross,
the one you draw an a
lottery coupon, a popular hobby in Finland. The inside of the
house is painted black up to the “coffee surface”, where
there is a terrace, where you can sit and relax with cup of coffee.
The cup has been on display
on various sites in Finland. When it was on an exhibition in
the Töölö-park
in the center of Helsinki, I even slept on the terrace, experiencing
Helsinki from a different view.
It was a part of a teaching project I made with
students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. We got cheap
ready made small cabins, which the students turned into sculptures.
For example
the giraffe house behind the Coffee cup house. forward
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