In collaboration with Erkki Pitkäranta and Jari Inkinen, 1995. The scale model of the project has been exhibited in the Wild exhibition in the Wäinö Aaltonen museum, 2007 and in the Fennofolk exhibition, Design Museum, Helsinki, 2008.
As a result of making the Clean/Puhdas/Ren performance exhibition (s. ???) I learned to know the owner of the cleaning company SOL, Liisa Joronen. She hired me to design the coming new headquarters of the cleaning company, together with architect Erkki Pitkäranta and interior designer Jari Inkinen. The company had bought the Apollo school in central Helsinki and the aim was to turn it into building based of fantasy and art, where artists’ and dancers’ studios were to be combined with a public cafe and an art collection as well as holding the headquarters of the company. We decided that the interventions would have a figurative base to make the design into something aesthetically new, interesting and challenging. We knew that it was best to leave the façade untouched to keep out of trouble with the building authorities.
The ground floor was based on water and ice and was meant to be a café´ open to the public. A big sculpture made of blue drop shapes with one foot in a pond shaped like duck dominated the space. The toilets were inside spaces shaped like toilet paper rolls, clad with paper so that visitors could draw on them.
The first floor was based on small hills and fields. The art collection of SOL was supposed to be placed on this floor, which had bulging floor to remind of fields. In the centre a big egg-like hole in the floor was supposed to extend into the upper floors and to take the shape of a big sun.
The second floor had themes of high mountains and mountain forests. In the middle of the egg-like hole a cluster of grapes would hold working places for around ten people. Other platforms were the brown squirrel shaped working station and the orange leaf shaped station, both hanging in the space. Openings in the wall were shaped like a shovel, a mouse and a house. This floor, as well as the third floor, were the floors where the company headquarters would reside.
The third floor was the space floor. It was controlled by a sculpture with a head as an earth globe, sitting on the edge of the hole in the floor. In the interior you can find rooftops, chimneys, lightnings, a rainbow. Here was also the company’s kitchen supposed to be, with a big table shaped like a hand and a thumb shaped like a big oven. In the air above the hole is a working station shaped like small cloud, a place for one person to work in.
But although we didn’t touch the façade, the project was way too wild for the authorities, whose taste was based on Scandinavian coolness. They fabricated a paper which protected the interior of the building, which meant the project had to be cancelled and SOL had to sell the building.
The project is discussed in the article on side (???)
The scale model of the project has been exhibited in the Wild exhibition in the Wäinö Aaltonen museum, 2007 and in the Fennofolk exhibition, Design Museum, Helsinki, 2008.
