BIM model screen shot of Sitra's timber office ©Arup

Back on the job here at Low2No. Work has been proceeding at a blistering pace in London and Berlin as our design team prepares to deliver our L2, or design development, drawings next week. This is a significant point in the project's progression as "end of L2" is when the local designers will take a leadership role in project implementation.

Interior BIM model screen shot of Sitra's timber office ©Arup

This month is the moment when the client team will step back and perform two critical tasks: costing and project review. Even in strong markets, a €60M investment can cause some consternation. But as the euro's stability decreases with every news cycle, we have some difficult decisions ahead of us.

We are committed to a triple bottom line plus carbon (TBL+CO2) approach and will review this next phase with this principle as our top level priority. It is increasingly clear that planning requirements and real estate costs make development in Helsinki difficult, especially without basic government support instruments (such as feed-in-tariffs), but we hope to find a way to make a low carbon, mixed-use development economically viable. 

BIM model screen shot of Sitra's timber office ©Arup

Interior BIM model screen shot of Sitra's timber office ©Arup

The client team is working to develop a joint company (landlord/janitor company) to own and manage the block's common infrastructure, energy infrastructure (PV), commercial space, and parking. When developing a block-wide sustainable solution, shared ownership provides critical synergistic benefits and is necessary to manage the block's shared resources as one entity. A joint management company solution is a new step toward social sustainability in Finland.

Sitra is also organizing a meeting with leadership from the real estate industry who are involved in writing new legislation for "3D" real estate formation (mixed-use code)—possibly to be implemented for the first time in our block. A mixed-use code will allow challenging ownership conditions to be overcome more easily, such as the one we face in our block, where the basement can have property lines independent from above ground property.

Word comes from Jukka this week on two projects he is shepherding: the European 11 Competition (he is a jury member and will tell more once it is public) and a board meeting of the LAICA project which helps individuals commercialize innovative energy solutions. The Energy Programme has continued to expand its impact and we look forward to more.

Over the past 6 months, we have been hard at work designing and building a new home for Low2No. This new site is intended to both be a place to learn more about the city block that we are building in Helsinki's Jätkäsaari district (recently named Airut, but more about that later) and provide a platform for a global discussion around transitioning the built environment to a low carbon future.

Diagram of the website's "code commits" since April 2011. A code commit is when the developer takes a snapshot of the site and saves it as it is being coded. In this phase, there were 336411 lines of code added, 32001 lines deleted.

Thank you to XOXCO for their tireless work on the back end of the site, and to Muotohiomo for design. Well done. Also thanks to my colleagues Bryan, Annemaria, and Olli.

The city block now has its own section on the site: the Block page where we will discuss the latest developments in its design, energy and carbon strategy, support of the people that will occupy it and some of the materials that have been developed by our team along the way.

We still believe that our Low2No competition was one of the most innovative approaches to sustainable design of the built environment anywhere, so we have refreshed and explained the many dimensions of that project here.

To the sustainability/carbon discussion side, we are beginning to open up a new area of work called the Low2No model. Low2No has always been a broad project with many initiatives. This had to do with the nature of challenge (the built environment has an extremely large set of stakeholders and areas of work), and also Sitra's mission (we work between sectors to promote systemic change).

Under the banner of the Low2No model, we are looking more directly at how our transitional approach to decarbonizing the built environment can and is being applied outside of our development project in Helsinki. We hope that this area of work will flourish following some key decisions that will be made by Sitra in the coming months.

Our new site coincides with the release of three articles, or in-depth looks at the issues central to the challenge of sustainability and the built environment as told by leading professionals from around the world. 

David Wood from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government discusses the role of private finance in building a sustainable city. Tuuli Kaskinen and Roope Mokka from Demos Helsinki reflect on their work in enabling individuals to help consumers make more energy and carbon conscious choices. And Federico Parolotto and Francesca Arcuri from Milan-based Mobility in Chain propose a better way of managing mobility and transportation planning.

These are original articles supported by Sitra and are the first of a series that will be published every month or so.

we are looking more directly at how our transitional approach to decarbonizing the built environment can and is being applied 

Finally, we will be publishing a series of dossiers that provide a broad look at issues such as carbon, energy in buildings, enabling people to make more sustainable choices, smart systems and services etc. The dossier format provides a way to expose and organize the myriad of issues, challenges and recent developments that each topic encompasses. 

This site will live and breath as we move forward with the Low2No project and will provide us the flexibility to add content as we go. Please check in regularly or subscribe to our RSS feed. And let us know what you think!

The venerable Holcim Foundation has awarded Sitra's office building design an acknowledgement prize! Congratulations to Sauerbruch Hutton, Arup and Experientia! The Holcim Jury recognized the multi-story timber office design as being exceptional and the low-to-no carbon emissions principle as a significant contribution to sustainable development.

Juan Lucas Young and Andrew Kiel (Sauerbruch Hutton); Jan-Christoph Zoels (Experientia); Leo Mittelholzer (Holcim Foundation)

The Jury statement read: In terms of its construction and program, the office building is commended by the jury for achieving the aspired principles of transferability, transparency and inventiveness. All of the construction, even the cores and the prefab façade panels will be entirely in Finnish timber – globally an innovation for a 26m high 6-storey office building. Beyond these measures, the project has a successful holistic approach towards its design, connecting social, ecological, aesthetic and economical demands on a high level and it is thus an outstanding example of how sustainable architecture can be achieved on a larger scale. More in the award report here.

We hope that this award will help raise the profile of timber construction and an integrated design approach here in Finland. 

A guest post by Outi Kuittinen of Demos Helsinki reporting on this week's Low2No Camp round table:

Low carbon living is about low-energy buildings, superb public transport and smart metres. It is also about groups and individuals that make our cities more beautiful, more flexible, more satisfying, more democratic and more sustainable. Low2No Camp organised by Demos Helsinki with support from Sitra, started this May by bringing together 25 passionate urban activists from Helsinki. To feed their imagination and to raise their bar higher, we shipped them to Berlin in a cargo ship to teach and to learn how to make our cities more sustainable and better to live. Back in Helsinki, we asked them to build their solution for a sustainable city and let them loose.

In summer months the campers were busy organizing their usual stuff like Helsinki Night Bike Rides, Ravintolapäivä (Restaurant day), Kallio Block Party, Punajuuri Block Party and farming urban vegetables. But on those hot days they also scribbled a lot of Post-its, discussed over Facebook, met face to face and sketched presentations thinking and thinking how to scale up what they are doing.

This week in Jätkäsaari they came out to potential partners. What we saw was our urban enthusiasts grown into urban entrepreneurs. They want to change the way we produce our food, use our space, dress ourselves and think of our possibilities to make the city our own. We are very proud to present 100 Ways to Eden, Hukkatila Ltd, pukuhuone.fi, School of Activism and Aquaponics Finland.

What is common to these ventures is that they don't do it all ready for us but enable us, the citizens of the city, to do ourselves.

100 ways to Eden is a cooperative that scales up urban farming. First they will take Pasila and create an urban farming centre in an old railway yard. It will harbour education, research and development on urban farming, plus exhibitions, food markets and gastronomic experiences. Next they will take Europe and Russia.

Hukkatila Ltd is a development company exploring the blue ocean of built environment: the mis- and underused square- and cubicmetres of the city. That is, for example the offices outside working hours, the basements of block of flats, derelict houses, areas waiting for the construction to start. The streetwise experts of Hukkatila will couple these spaces with right users in need, develop concepts to bring the space alive and invest in building the activity.

Pukuhuone.fi (The Dressing room) believes that in ethical and ecological consumption clothes are the new food. Pukuhuone.fi is a web-based service that helps us to develop our own style by providing well-edited inspiration, bringing us the providers that offer quality and style instead of fashion and throwawayism, enabling us to lend and rent clothes and telling how to take care of our belongings.

School of Activism continues what Low2No Camp started. It builds networks of passionate actors and seeds urban activism where its needed. It travels to help local people to solve the problems of their city. From the point of view of the public sector, School of Activism helps to commit the citizens to their city and to bring about fresh solutions. For companies it offers new creative contacts and ideas.

Aquaponics Finland is a closed system of food production that supplies us with plenty of fish and vegetables – grown in our homes, schools and neighborhoods. And it does it with 70% less energy compared to the normal cultivation.

These urban start-ups are out and they are serious. Want to help them fly? Check their contact details on their presentations or contact them through Outi: outi.kuittinen(at)demos.fi.

Thanks Outi!

Congratulations to our friends and colleagues at Experientia for winning Italy's National Prize for Innovation in Services! 

Early user-energy interface developed for Low2No by Experientia and the Design Team

In Rome, the President of the Italian republic, Giorgio Napolitano, awarded Experientia for their work in the Low2No project as part of Italy's National Day of Innovation. The award cited Experientia's planning of "a residential area in Finland with low CO2 emissions, using innovative methodologies devised in Italy." 

Experientia's President Michele Visciola receives the Italian National Prize for Innovation in Services from the President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano [Experientia]

See Experientia's press release and an interview with Senior Partner Mark Vanderbeeken. We are thrilled for Experientia and excited that Low2No has received international recognition for its innovative approach to improving the built environment. Our congratulations to Jan-Christoph, Mark, Irene and the Low2No team at Experientia!

Those embarking on major urban developments often conduct study tours in order to benchmark their plans against current best practice. As Low2No begins to pick up pace, we’re beginning to become a stop on such tours, even though there’s only a hole in the ground in terms of tangible progress at Jätkäsaari.

Katri Vala district heating and cooling plant, Helsinki [Dan Hill]

Last weekend, the Low2No team received visitors from a major urban planning project in Melbourne, Australia. I’d worked on that project’s initiation stage when at Arup, co-running one of the original design charrettes with Grimshaw Architects, who make up the project’s core designers with Field Operations out of New York. So it was great to see familiar faces at a very different latitude, and lead them through 24 hours worth of download about Low2No and the context of urban development in Helsinki.

Katri Vala district heating and cooling plant, Helsinki [Dan Hill]

The Australian-based team, led by the Victorian State Government, and in particular the State’s urban development arm, VicUrban, were particularly interested in our take on energy generation and consumption, including behaviour change and consumer attitudes, in terms of Low2No. As they’d just flown in from Stockholm that morning (previously having seen projects such as Bo01 in Malmö and Orestad in Copenhagen), I woke them up with a brisk walk around Töölönlahti, still beautiful despite the slate grey skies and northerly breeze. And later that afternoon, we hosted a summit at Sitra HQ, with Sitra project leaders Jukka Noponen and Marco Steinberg.

In between, however, we hosted a tour of Helsinki’s best-kept secrets— the vast, underground district heating and cooling system at Katri Vala Park in the Sörnäinen district.

Katri Vala district heating and cooling plant, Helsinki [Dan Hill]

Niko Wirgentius of Helsingin Energia was kind enough to give up his Saturday afternoon to show us around this extraordinary facility. There’s more information at the Helsingin Energia website, though it’s probably fair to see that this is something you have to experience in the flesh to understand the significance of this scale of investment.

Niko led our team through an unmarked door and down into the plant. It’s around 25 metres underground though there are numerous tunnels leading in and out that go a lot deeper. The equipment is of course enormous, contained within cave after cave blasted from the firm bedrock that Helsinki sits upon (which is what partly enables the city’s extensive network of subterranean infrastructure.) Equipment is manufactured all over Europe, with the country of origin represented by a flag stuck on the side. These plants are connected by energy tunnels and service corridors which run for tens of kilometres, sometimes via underground lakes, in all directions.
Wirgentius is quick to point out that it’s the world’s largest heat pump, but what the facility does is simple; it just does it at scale.

Katri Vala district heating and cooling plant, Helsinki [Dan Hill]

“A high volume of purified wastewater, the heat of which is utilised in district heat production, flows in the wastewater outfall tunnel 24 hours a day. In winter, heat energy is obtained with heat pumps from purified wastewater, which is led from the Viikinmäki central waste water treatment plant to the sea. In winter, the necessary district cooling energy is obtained direct from the sea with heat exchangers. In summer, heat energy is transmitted from the return water in district cooling, in which case the heat pumps produce both district heat and district cooling. If all of the heat produced in the summer season is not needed, the extra heat can be condensed into the sea.”

It’s a great example of a form of symbiosis, in which the waste from one system is the input into another, and the plant supplies around 40,000 residents in the district above with heating and cooling, most of whom are oblivious to the infrastructure beneath their buildings (the plant’s exact location is secret.)

The scale of investment is also impressive – the ability of the city to plan for the future by investing in such infrastructure impressed the Victorian team no end. But, as Wirgentius pointed out, the city is probably going to be around in 20 years, and will probably require some heating; it’s not a risky investment in that sense.

With Low2No, we’re currently exploring a mixed approach to energy generation, including photovoltaic for partial energy generation as well as geothermal, and with the bulk of heating and cooling requirements handled by a bio-heat product developed by Helsingin Energia. The Australian team were also interested in our approach to behaviour change and consumer behaviour, which has been developed by Arup and Experientia so far. More to follow on all that.

Katri Vala district heating and cooling plant, Helsinki [Dan Hill]

You don’t have to be an infrastructure geek to be impressed by Katri Vala — though those of us in the team who are had to be dragged away from exploring some of the deeper tunnels —but the aspects that the Victorian team were still talking about late into evening atop the Hotel Torni were the ability for a city to not only plan sustainable infrastructure requirements into the future, but to make and deliver upon the investment case too.

Some great video from Demos at Low2No camp in Berlin:

Nice work! We hope to have a guest post from the Demos folks once everyone has had some time to reflect.

Low2No Informatics Workbook

Also this week, it is time that I catch up on some overdue news. I am very happy to announce that Dan Hill of Arup and City of Sound fame (among others) has brought his family to Helsinki and joined our team! Dan was instrumental in framing and delivering Low2No’s informatics workstream on the design team side (see some of his Low2No Informatics Workbook below). We are lucky to now have him on the client side, although I am sure he feels a bit of whiplash. As he settles into his role at here at Sitra, look for him to uncover realization of the informatics workstream and Sitra’s organizational evolution into its new HQ through his future posts. In addition to being a tremendous ambassador for the project, he will be key in developing what’s next for Low2No. Welcome Dan!

Low2No Informatics Workbook

Low2No Informatics Workbook

This week, a reminder of one of principal motivations for this project:

Ruoholahti Coal Delivery from Sitra- Finnish Innovation Fund

What you see is coal from Eastern Europe or Russia being offloaded into hoppers that carry the coal into one of the world's largest underground coal storage facilities. Ruoholahti used to be home to another "world's largest." See the 8 story coal pile that used to be stored above ground before the cavern was completed. 

Jätkäsaari as seen from the south. In the white box is one of the city's largest combined heat and power plants and it's coal pile in the background

There are many issues raised by this footage: carbon emissions, climate change, energy security, wealth transfer, independence, etc. In some ways, it is unfortunate that Ruoholahti's coal pile has been pushed underground, out of public view. 

Landscape design of the Low2No block is underway with Berlin-based Sinai and Sauerbruch Hutton. 

Rather than show their early proposals, posted below are a series of diagrams that attempt to situate native elements of the Finnish landscape on our site. The process (layering images on sketches) is straightforward, but the results are not. Careful manipulation of the image scale opens possibilities for landscape to communicate intent as much as say, building integrated renewables. Landscape will help to position the project in the public's imagination; a piece of the city with distinctly Finnish DNA, but adapted to a new century where performance vies with aesthetics and geometry for top billing. 

Low2No block landscape diagrams