Architectonic installation for the Helsinki Festival 2004.
Wooden public attic construction on legs facing the Parliament of Finland in Helsinki.
C-Laboratory task force: Christian Edlinger, Daniel Guishard, Dirk Schultz, Tuomas Makkonen.
During the Helsinki Festival the citizens were offered a public attic space for recycling objects, drink tea and talk. The material for the attic was collected from left over wood from different construction sites around Helsinki.
Like the attic is the memory and subconscious of the house we need to build up urban public attics to reinforce the common psyche and give the urban subconscious platforms to take form. The urban attics are offering a possibility to meet human time.
Attics are places to store things. The objects on attic have fine qualities of meaning and story. Walkabout in other people's heads. The attic space is not fixed to the present moment but floats in time being a space where memories and subconscious can be met mixing architecture and poetry. On this level every human being can be touched. A personal story might get evoked inside every one entering the attic - this is human architecture and this we must bring to city.
These structures are not at ground level, they are above it. It is necessary to climb up a set of stairs or a ladder in order to access them. Like emotional memories are stored upstairs in the brain. Memory is rarely, if ever, perfect. The objects on the attic might get changed by the time becoming distorted or no longer being what was the truth then. The truth now is a memory that you had which has been manipulated by every second of your life experience.
The story is alive in us. We need to scale this up into urban planning with the same human accidental quality of truth.
Cover of the Human - free newspaper for the London Architecture Biennale 2004, C-Laboratory.
