Laivapoika Housing

The Laivapoika housing comprises three six-storey wings, arranged as a semi-open block along the edges of a wedge-shaped city block bounded by two streets. The ensemble, located immediately at the beginning of the Ruoholahti canal, is in terms of the cityscape crowned by an eight-storey tower and, together with the building on the opposite bank of the canal, forms the gateway to the Ruoholahti canal milieu.

Following the period of postmodernism that also momentarily reached Finland – and which can still be felt in parts of Ruoholahti built at the turn of the 1990s – Laivapoika clearly was a return to the modernist tradition. The defining principle of the facade composition is the balance between the vertical and horizontal elements. The pure white concrete of the tower part, rising up from the top of pillars, stands out from the wings that border the block. The main material of the block’s outer perimeter is concrete, coloured blue-grey and with distinctive horizontal grooves, accentuated with deep-blue vertical bands of sheet metal. The balcony towers with their glass-brick walls connect the various wings, and the glazed balconies on both the outer and inner perimeters of the block act as a counterbalance to the imposing concrete frame.

The steel details of the balconies and the carefully considered dark red of the railings, as well as the fences and hand-laid slate retaining walls on the ground floor, elevate Laivapoika above standard prefabricated construction. It received the award of the Concrete Structure of the Year in 1995. The building has withstood the test of time, and its architecture still exudes an overall air of quality.

Typically for the Ruoholahti district, Laivapoika’s 131 dwellings consist of both rental and owner-occupied flats. Additionally, there are also group housing for the disabled, a foster home, a group of flats especially designed for the elderly, and barrier-free flats. The flats range in size from single rooms to five rooms, and all of them have a balcony or roof terrace. Special attention has been paid to the spaciousness, adaptability and brightness of the flats, as well as to the design of the stairwells, where the architects have wanted to replicate the grandeur typical of apartment buildings of past decades.

Due to its location, Laivapoika interacts intensely with its surroundings. The name of the housing (Laivapoika: literally “shipboy”) and its blue tones are references to the surrounding seascape. Laivapoika’s reflection is mirrored in the surface of the canal, and the canal milieu with its vegetation, bridges and lighting, creates a setting for the housing complex that lives in accordance with the passage of the day and seasons. Ruoholahti’s award-winning canal milieu, with its various terraces and bridges, was designed by Juhani Pallasmaa.

Petteri Kummala

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“Asunto-oy Laivapoika” (1995). Arkkitehti, 4/1995, pp. 46–51.

Davey, Peter (1997). “Concrete Finns”, The Architectural Review, vol. 201, no. 1204, June 1997, pp. 46–50.

”Vuoden 1995 betonirakenne. Asunto Oy Laivapoika” (1995), in 50: Vuoden betonirakenne 1970–2019 / Concrete Structure 1970–2019. Ed. Vesa Tompuri and Maritta Koivisto. Helsinki: Betoniteollisuus ry. pp. 90–91.