Kaanon, greenhouse installation

Espoon Askelmerkit, Tapiola, Finland 4.5.-30.9.2016

Designed and built together with architect Janne Karjalainen.

Kaanon was a greenhouse installation, placed in the central pool of garden city Tapiola, the largest and most valuable example of the post-war urban plannning in Finland. The greenhouse was shaped as an icosahedron, one of the Platonic solids Johannes Kepler used in his laws of planetary motion,. In Platoe’s dialogues, icosahedron is associated with water.

The piece was a reminder how nonhuman powers effect on plans and strategies made by humans: wild plants grow free and escape from the solid, mechanistic form. The installation was a hommage to Finnish architect Aulis Blomstedt, whose ideas of harmony, human scale design and nature’s importance to living were dismissed during the rational budget-building era post-1973 oil crisis.