Anssi Lassila will be lecturing in Ljubljana at the Big Architecture 16 conference.

BA16‐ Big Architecture 16

At the Slovenian Design Center

In Ljubljana

At 3 pm on Thursday, April 21, 2016

Pushing the Boundaries of Wood

Each year (since 2008) organizer Zavod Big hosts an architecture conference that aims to bring together exceptional architectural practitioners and thinkers to present their work, views and vision around a timely theme of particular relevance and importance. This year the theme is Pushing the Boundaries of Wood.

In previous years some world‐renown practices have participated in the program, UN Studio (Netherlands), Snøhetta AS (Norway), NL Architects (Netherlands), Eduard Francois (France), Grimshaw Architects (UK), C.F. Møller Architects (Denmark), Nieto Sobejano (Spain), Carme Pinos (Spain), and Zvi Hecker (Germany) among many others. (For more information, see here)

This year the conference will explore the potentials of wooden architecture as a tool for innovative and sustainable future construction development. It aims to present positive examples of overcoming the impossible, of constructing multi‐storey wooden buildings and pushing the boundaries of wooden constructions. 

In this lecture Anssi Lassila will focus on presenting the Puukuokka Apartment Block as an example of housing in wood on a large scale. 

For the full program for the conference, see here 

Completed in November 2014, Puukuokka is the first eight-story high wooden apartment building in Finland. It explores the potential of modular prefabricated CLT construction to meet the goal of providing high quality, environmentally responsible and affordable housing.

Anssi Lassila has extensive experience in working with wood in architecture. In his approach he emphasizes the potential embedded in exploring new methods and techniques as a means of developing new solutions in building. In Puukuokka, the goal was to find a solution that makes the best possible use of the technical and aesthetic qualities of CLT and to create a wooden building in large scale with a distinct architectonic expression of its own. The vision is to provide the residents with a functional space rich in experiential qualities.

Puukuokka served as a pilot case to develop and test a CLT based system of volumetric modules. Working with CLT made it possible to create a multi-story apartment building with a primary load bearing structure and frame fully made of wood. The use of prefabricated modules also made it possible to cut the construction time on site down to six months and to reduce the exposure to weather conditions. That made it possible to achieve a higher quality in the end result. 

Puukuokka has been awarded with several prizes, most notably the Finlandia Prize for Architecture in 2015, as well as the Wood Prize 2015, the Canadian Wood Design and Architecture Award 2015/2016, and the Resident Act of the Year Award in 2015.