How Two Helsinki Architects Transformed a Parking Lot Into a Paradise for Pollinators

Welcome to Wildlife Week, an exploration of what happens when nature and home meet.

It seems we’re out of touch. A lot of the time, our homes, offices, and cities are orderly boxes built around more boxes, forming barriers that reduce chaos in favor of control, which leaves us far removed from every other form of life. According to self-described environmental architects Elina Koivisto and Maiju Suomi, that’s no way to live. If we want to design a more sustainable future, they say, we’re going to have to figuratively—and literally—break down the kinds of walls we’ve been conditioned to build.

In one example of how we can rekindle a connection with Mother Earth, in June this year, Koivisto and Suomi introduced a pollinator and plant paradise to a parking lot between the Design Museum and the Museum of Finnish Architecture in their hometown of Helsinki. Called the Alusta Pavilion, the pop-up parklet’s exposed framework of clay bricks and wood beams creates an inviting habitat for birds, bees, insects, plants, and fungi, and an unexpected place where human visitors can get up close and personal with a vibrant ecosystem.

While pedestrians who stumble on the project will be pleasantly surprised with the pop of greenery, the pavilion has also served as a starting point for discussions around sustainable building and natural processes in more academic settings: with ecology researchers who helped Suomi and Koivisto translate the needs of plants and insects into a built design; in a series hosted by the Aalto University Department of Design, where the project is part of Suomi’s doctoral studies; and with kids from a summer camp hosted by the architecture museum.

Now that the pavilion is very much at the whims of Suomi and Koivisto’s "clients"—the pollinators and their plant pals—what happens next is, by design, beyond their control. And that’s where things get interesting. Here, the architects share what went into creating the pavilion, what happens when we hand over agency of the built environment to natural processes, and how connecting with other species, even if just for a moment in the middle of a city, can patch up our relationship with nature.

Dwell: You are environmental architects—for those of us scratching our heads, can you explain what that is?

Maiju Suomi:I would say that it’s double sided. I would first refer to Susan Hagen, a British architectural professor who defined the field. She says that if you want architecture to be seen as an environmental act, or as environmental architecture, it should be trying to make the natural environment better in some way—you’re protecting the living conditions of all species. At the same time, it’s not just a practical act, it’s also art. We want to communicate on a symbolic level the responsibility of architecture to create better environments.

Tell us about your latest work, the Alusta Pavilion. How did it take shape? How is it an example of environmental architecture?

Suomi: We wanted to take an urban spot, this parking lot between the museums in Helsinki, and see how we could bring in more life—to add biodiversity where it was lacking. In this case we decided it would be interesting to work with pollinating insects because it’s such an easy way to communicate the interconnectedness of [human] needs with the needs of the other species. So, practically, we wanted to create a space where both pollinating insects could feel well, and at the same time, human beings could feel well.

Elina Koivisto:At the pavilion, there are these benches that run into the vegetation. So you get to decide how much you want to interact with the insects. [Academic] Donna Haraway has a concept, "intimacy without proximity," and that’s something that we kept in mind with the design. We don’t want to create clashes between species, but facilitate coexistence.