Rebuilding 2.0
Team
REX/Croxton Collaborative/NOW – Transsolar Energietechnik – Magnusson Klemencic Associates – Bureau Bas Smets – 2×4 – Arup New York – Front – Jonathan Rose Companies
Statement from project team
Sustainability mandates systemic change. Systemic change requires doing more. Sustainability requires impacting less. REBUILDING 2.0 is a strategy for Finland to impact less by doing more.
Finland has a history of surmounting collective challenges with nation-wide rebuilding projects. Currently, Finland has one of the world’s largest per capita ecological footprints, and faces an extraordinary challenge in overcoming its environmental deficit.
Energy efficient buildings alone are not enough to meet this challenge. Only by changing behaviour— particularly mass migration to the suburbs and its accompanying carbon-intensive lifestyle—can Finland reach ecological balance. Finland must initiate REBUILDING 2.0, a new national project to make more Nature, more City and less Sprawl.
Built on Jätkäsaari, but learning from Helsinki’s core, THE REBUILDING is a tool for generating more density, more diversity, more City at the building scale. Two Residential Towers, repurposing Finland’s steel capabilities for sustainable and adaptable construction, provide light, air and views to its inhabitants. Its Headquarters unites the need for community-building with the seemingly contradictory demand for flexibility. Its Urban Infill offers 50.000 m3 of potential, capable of being “tuned” to meet the specific and changing needs of its neighbourhood, while affording greater stakeholder participation. Although it reduces energy consumption by 39% and carbon emissions by 50% relative to a comparable code compliant project, THE REBUILDING recognizes that urbanity itself is the embodiment of sustainability. It is dense, diverse, evolving and full of people—living and working, meeting and sleeping, growing up and making things.
A nation of immense financial, natural, infrastructural and intellectual wealth, Finland also possesses a unique catalyst to power systemic change: Sitra. It is time for Finns to galvanize these strengths to meet the challenge of carbon neutrality, to become a global exemplar.
REBUILDING 2.0 is the strategy.
THE REBUILDING is the first step.
