Contemporary residential architecture in Helsinki is often a big disappointment, not only because of the evidently bad quality of the physical architecture, but also because of the fact that profit comes before wellbeing. When introduced to the assignment of creating a suburban apartment building, my first thought was to create a building where the goal is to maximise the quality of each apartment and enable each of them to get an appropriate space division, amount of natural light and quality of material. Naive, of course but there is no better way of understanding what makes residential buildings great than trying to achieve that greatness while you still can, before construction companies start shaving all the good elements off your design. My butterfly design with two identical residential complexes joined together by a shared staircase and elevator section got the name Solfjäder, which translates to Sunfeather and ultimately means handheld fan in Swedish, which is my mother tongue. That is due to shape but also the design's ability let in sunlight throughout. The building has three types of apartments: 2-room solutions, 3-room solutions and a large 5+ room solution. Each apartment has a balcony and angular corners that take inspiration from the great area of residential design in the 1950s. A solution that allows for multiple directions of light on one single side of the apartment. For once, I focused more on the layout of the house than it's adaption to the surrounding context which results in the design being quite eye-catching in the area of 60s and 70s concrete housing, but at the same time it pays an homage to the popular suburban designs of the 40s and 50s in the Helsinki area, areas of bright colours, bay windows and corner balconies.

I have long been fascinated about how the 40s and 50s functionalist housing architecture provide such warmth and calmness in the design with simple elements and wanted to utilise the principles in a contemporary design. Even though the result can be critiqued for being too old-school, I am content with the end result and the quality of the apartments in my final design.