Space for Culture: the Dipoli Aalto University

If you were to build a space where culture and science are made every single day would you be able to shape it? And if the answer is yes, what material and what form would you choose?

These are questions Reima Pietilä and Raili Pietilä (architects also for the Kaleva Church) must have asked to themselves when they had to think to the project. The building, located on the edge of the Alvar Aalto designed Otaniemi campus, is the result of an architectural competition organized in 1961, where the Pietiläs’ entry was originally awarded shared 2nd prize and later selected as the winner of the second competition organized between the two 2nd prize winners.

Like with the church in Tampere, by the same designers, here Alvar Aalto’s influence is clearly recognizable in the characteristic curved forms of the Dipoli building, an emblematic and experimental complex originally owned by the student union of the Helsinki University of Technology. Recently, the building has gone through a complete renovation and will now get a new life as the main building of Aalto University.

The concave and convex walls combine smoothly and make the building appear to have grown organically or naturally. In contrast, the less emblematic parts of the program are organized in a grid, clearly generating a front for the building – characterized by its expressiveness and its fragmented volume – and a back, noteworthy for its order and organization in keeping with basic practical criteria.

Although concrete is the dominant material in the structure, it is left exposed mainly in the interior of the building, while on the outside it is covered with copper sheet metal combined with wooden joinery.

Being an expression of Finnish culture, the building uses extensively materials from Finnish nature, such as pine wood, copper, and natural rocks. Dipoli has 500 windows of which only four are identical. The architects originally planned for as little interference with the natural granite of the site as possible; but blasting the hard granite base rock inevitably fragmented it. The building is seen as a key example of organic architecture. This creation has been also a cultural endeavour by the two, so much so that Reima Pietilä himself said of the building:

«As in Samuel Beckett’s novels, there are no exposed trench marks of balance. The concept of a traditional balance of composition is redundant in the design aesthetics of Dipoli. (…) after the hill top was blasted the broken heaps of rock gave an initial image which one could follow with the slow, crawling motion of structure. The reptilian metaphoric image: the silhouetted dinosaur accentuating the rhythmic consistency of retardation.»

Also, if today the design is much appreciated, its shape has been discussed in the past. The radical, sculpture-like architecture of Dipoli, with its copper and granite cladding, was met with contradictory reviews. According to the Norwegian critic Christian Norberg-Schulz, it represented architecture that takes local values into account, instead of being a work of generic modernism. Juhani Pallasmaa wrote in Arkkitehti magazine in 1967 that the design of the building did not comply with the principles of responsibility. Reima Pietilä said that Dipoli “goes against good taste” and defends the right “to be different but still be architecture.” In his opinion, the purpose of Dipoli was to provoke discussion and to further develop over time.

Undoubtedly, the Dipoli Aalto University is a masterpiece of modernism and concrete usage. If you want to know more about European concrete heritage follow InnovaConcrete Project on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. You can also find an entire map of concrete based and endangered buildings on 100ofthe20th website.