☉ Museum of History and Future is a proposal by Studio812 for City of Turku designed in 2024. It is located in Turku Finland in a seaside setting. Its scale is medium with a surface of 9.400 sqm an estimated budget of 39.000.000 € and a ratio of 4.149 €/sqm. Key materials are concrete wood and vegetal. Mino Works collaborated as visualizer. Concepts such as stratification open ground floor lattice courtyard nature ruin and stair are explored. Review the 6 proposals for the same competition.
The future museum occupies the southwest corner of the competition site, flanking the pedestrian sea promenade and continuing the existing/planned building volume. By placing it exactly there, we see the possibility of having short and direct vehicle/maintenance connections, maximizing the entire pedestrian and landscape area. The East part of the site is left wholly unoccupied, making a solid connection with the future park around the castle and making the museum a natural part. Landscape planning has a central role in the entire project, and the museum itself, on the ground level, occupies only less than 15% of the given site with complex building elements, and we can see one massive part of it as a pure park and art garden. The reference for this layout comes from this type of landscape, native and often even endemic Finnish species and landscape features – the connection between water, land and trees. It is well known that nothing is better than leaving nature occupied and revitalizing once it is covered with asphalt land. The project proposes a kind of ‘storage’ for art and artefacts raised and flying above the ground as in the typical vernacular buildings in some parts of the country and geographical area. With that, create a new ‘wetland’ on the site, made out of marshes, swamps, bog ponds, and others, aside from local tree species, which will attract the birds and animals native to this natural environment. At the same time, this type of landscape would work as a buffer and a reservoir in case of storms and high-water events. The building is a low, calm volume along the waterfront pathway. The layout follows the principle of having inner courtyards, as it is also in the nearby castle, but it is raised to make the ground floor an open park area instead of a blind border wall. The volume occupies a minimal amount of the side on the ground level and a bigger one when comparing the top levels. So, it creates a porous volume that is pervious and passable.