This landscape design for a coastal strip in Helsinki and the architectural design for a bathhouse at a local road junction, are based partly on local characteristics and partly on what the senses perceive. The project unwinds a strategy for restructuring the area. Elements already present in the landscape are deployed to give the area a greater clarity. The bathhouse has a long wall as its organizing element. Its general programme is housed in the portion rising ramp-like from the water, while the pier contains the saunas, that most Finnish of functions.

I walk through my own drawings. The speed of my gait along the coast is slower than that of my hand, which has drawn that same line so many times. Long walls of rusted steel stand at an angle in the grass lining the track which once carried trains through the area. I pass the walls of varying height and direction. Time and again I find myself between city and sea, now in a natural space, then in an urban one. From a hill I look down across the entire area, and far out to sea to the islands. And I see the bathhouse lying along the water, a flat fan-shape with wood roofs and a long pier reaching into the sea.

Once again it is the rust-coloured wall that is directional, flanked as it is by the road ascending to the building. On reaching the top I enter and immediately see below me a swimming pool bounded by large timber posts. The roofs descend at an angle, the floor is rugged like the rocks outside. The spaces between the pools have wood floors, warmer and softer for the feet. Daylight enters the space along the low rear wall in long narrow stripes. Looking through a large window I see the sea and a long pier with its floating saunas.

Place of education: TU Delft
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Umberto Barbieri, Clemens Steenbergen & Jan van de Voort