Chain Reactor

Architectonic installation for the 3rd Biennale of Montreal, Canada, 2002.

6 x6 x 6 metres cubic steel frame supporting walls of steel chain in the heart of the Montreal information technology area in the Old City.


Inside the structure is a qhite gravel floor in the middle of which 4 benches and a fireplace out of stone.


People enter to gather around the fire and return to their offices with the smell of smoke in their clothes.

Casagrande & Rintala

Installation 1:2001

The installation 1:2001 is a circular wall of religious, ideological and philosophical books from all over the world. The diameter of the circle is 6,37 metres (diameter of Earth 1:2001000 according to Neil Heimler's Principles of Science) adn the height of the wall is 6,37:2. The books are used as bricks, title-backs outwards.


There will be one entrance to the interior of the installation, which will be a white wall to the contrast of the various title-backs seen on the outside. The viewer inside the installtion will be in focus.


Casagrande & Rintala
Architectural installation for the Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte Contemporanea di Firenze

LINK

Obihiro Walking Street

FORGET THE FORGETTING

The small town of Obihiro (maybe some 200.000 people) in Hokkaido contacted me and Sami and asked us to run a workshop for the city architects and urban planners. The Obihiro people had been complaining that the city is boring, that the architects and urban planners had done a poor work. When you say things like this in Japan, they take it seriously.

Obihiro instant village.

We flew to Obihiro and said that the conditions are such that you must take your children to a gym and there will be some basic materials like cardboard and paint. In the gym we told the children that now you are the architects and your mothers and fathers are just cheap labor. You tell them how to make a good house and they will do exactly how you say. The only condition for the house is that a child must fit in.

Say hello to my little friend.

The houses got done. We took the children inside the carboard houses to a walk into the city as a walking street. People liked. Sometimes the children needed to take a ret and an instant village took place. It was good to see the organizing of the urbanism based on that the grocery store has to gossip with the church or alike. The children maybe had patience to stay put for 3 minutes and then the grocery store would move to another location to talk with somebody else. All of this was documented carefully by the Japanese.

One of these day these streets are gonna get organized.

In the picturee you see a child's house. There is even smoke coming out of the chimney. The house behind him is done by his father. It is interesting to think that you can draw a line between these two houses and during this line a lot seems to happen. Something that we call education of growing up. Anyway, when you see the child's house, we seem to forget a lot. Real architecture is to forget the forgetting.

Potemkin

POTEMKIN - park for post industrial meditation. Drawing Marco Casagrande.

A permanent park for post industrial meditation in Kuramata village, Japan. Commissioned by Echigo-Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial 2003. A cultivated junk yard as a mixture of a temple and machine. Big industrial park including in and outdoor spaces constructed out of 1 inch thick Kawasaki steel plates, 130 m long, 12 m wide, 5 m high. Other materials used: white gravel, Kama River bottom stones, crushed concrete, crushed glass, wood, volcanic saand, concrete, asphalt.



The park is situated castle like looking over the Kuramata rice fields and Kamagawa River. Potemkin is blessed and spirituously connected to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan.



The working group was put together with operators from Alaska, Norway, England, Japan, Finland and France.

Casagrande & Rintala
Kuramata village, Nijgata province, Japan 2003
Echigo Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial
Photos: Dean Carman

Floating Sauna

Constructed in 2002 for the community of Rosendal, Norway the sauna in the Hardangerfjord seves as a democratic centerpoint of the village.

One comes to the public sauna swimming or with a rowing boat, takes off the clothes and enters the bath. The floor is open to the sea, making it possible to have a dip inside the sauna.

The walls are semi-transparent and pulsating according to the steam raising up from the water thrown to the hot stones. All the village can see when the things are cooking.

Norwegians are the masters of boat building, they are the original Vikings, and Finns can not live without a sauna. The Floating Sauna is a happy marriage between the Finnish and Norwegian cultures.

Casagrande & Rintala with Västlands Kunstakademiet

Floating Sauna - drawing by Marco Casagrande.

Redrum

Rerdum! Redrum! Drawing Marco Casagrande.

We were invited to Anchorage in February 2003 by Alaska Design Forum and decided to drive there by car. We shipped a Land Rover Defender from Helsinki to Halifax Nova Scotia in the Atlantic coast of Canada and drove it to Anchorage across the frozen North America. The Alaska Highway is surrounded by broken trucks, oil tanks and occasional moose. the closer to Alaska you get the more oil related junk there is in the nature.

Inspired by this and the Alaskan oil industry in general we decided to build a temple for oil in the middle of Anchorage. The material is recycled Alaska Railroad oil tanks cut to sections and set standing to frame away the city and open to sky. The floor is out of 7.000 pounds of oyster shells, the origin of oil. The brutal structure is painted bright red inside and has a fireplace in the end.

There was a vote in the local TV: "Is this a piece of fine art of a slap against the face of Alaska?" Fine arts lost. People were complaining that the temple smelled like oil.


Casagrande & Rintala 2003
Alaska Design Form
Anchorage Alaska
Link

Architizer
Wikipedia

Land(e)scape

Architectonic landscape installation realized in Savonlinna, Finland, 1999

Three abandoned barnhouses mounted on wooden shanks in the hight of 10 meters in order to give them a slow, majestic walk.

Desolate, longing after their farmers, the barns have cut their primeval union with the soil and are now swaying towards the cities of the south.

The story ended on a dark night of October when the barns were set on fire by the coreography of dancer Reijo Kela during a traditional slaughtrer carnival. The work was commenting the desertation process of Finnish countryside.

- See the video

Architectural Review 12/99, Emerging Architecture Award
La Biennale di Venezia 7. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura

Dallas-Kalevala

Dallas-Kalevala is a journey from todays existance back to origines of people living between Finland and Hokkaido. It is also a personal journey to feel genetic memory in places people always have been moving between east and west.



Our journey started in Helsinki Finland and ended in Obihiro Hokkaido Japan. The trip was made by car - Land Rover Defender. We followed roughly the borderline between taiga and tundra, cities and nomads. This is the climate area the northern civilizations exist.

We photgraphed grandmothers, collected old axes and recorded local radio. Each place the same prosedure.



Daily routines included finding diesel, making documentation, finding food, navigating, asking for the road, driving and setting up camp in safe locations. We slept in the nature and avoided big cities. When the road stopped we got diesel from road construction workers of the future Amur highway or from timber machines. This fuel was for free or exchanged to Finnish beer or conservated food.

12.000 km included good roads with relatively high speed, bad road on which we could keep quite normal speed but personal cars were crawling, tracks suitable only for military trucks and jeeps, road construction beds in different states of process and off road to some extreme nastiness with mud, rivercrossings, wet land, dust and dirt etc. Our Defender was equipped with a snorkel, winch and bottom armor. We crossed 10 bigger rivers and many more smaller ones. The car got stucked several times and was dragged onwards with the winch. We carried with us 140 litres of spare diesel in canisters. Between Cita and Simanovsk there is no roads shown on map. This distance is about 1000 km.

Near Erofej Pavlovic some 40 km north of Chinese border and river Amur the journey faced its hardest difficulties. We tried to approach Erofej Pavlovic from Amazar but got stucked in an endless wet marshland. The clouds were promising heavy rain which would mean us spending the rest of the year in the mud. Step by step we got back from the marsh with winching and some unconventional methods of subconscious driving. Just before the rain which made the whole marsh to a floting field of muddy porrige. We managed to go round the wetlands and found againg the construction site of the future highway. No bridges of course and the track was cut by the deep river Urka. Two of the big military 6 x 6 wheel drive Kamaz trucks had tried to cross it and the wrecks stood in the middle of the deep river together with a huge road construction machine that had tried to come to help them. The river was too bad. No chance to cross it and we had to turn back.



Luckily we were not alone with the problem. Vasili and Sergei from Sahalin needed to get their Kamaz also to the other side of the river and together with them we managed to organize us an own train in Amazar on which the vehicles were mounted. It took us four days with the train to cross the river. Due to Russian railroad logistics we had to travel back to Mogocha to be connected to a bigger train, then again to Amazar and finally over the river to Erofej Pavlovic and further to Skovorodino where we got the car of the platform.

We carried with us conserved food and Finnish beer to celebrate important moments. Fresh fish from the rivers and shashlik brought occasional luxury to the daily life. Our medical pack included surgery eguippement, oxygen, anti-shock liquides, antibiotics and other drugs. We had contact with doctors from EMA -group (Emergency Medical Assistace) every third day with a satellite telephone to report our location and state of fysical and mental health. In case of trouble we could contact the EMA doctors to get on-line medical assistance, which was luckily not needed. Also evacuation procedures were prepaired.



We know it is possible to go from Finland to Japan on ground. It has always been possible. What was important to realize was how natural it has been for the people to move east-west wise. One grandmother in Burjatia was half Ukrainan half Chinese. One grandmother in Sahalin was born in the Finnish border in Karelia and spoke Karelian Finnish. The grandmother in Japan was born in Sahalin. In the middle of Siberia we could see Tatar villages. In Irkutsk there is a lively Chinese market. From Ural to east every modern car is a second hand vehicle imported from Japan. Asia as we see it starts in Amur, not in Ural as we have been told. Siberia is not Europe and not Asia. Everywhere in this nordic borderline we could feel home. We could understand the logics of the nature and how man is facing his surroundings. Birch tree, kuckoo and the same stars followed us all the way. Japanese turist is a legend. For us now you are just the next door neighbour.



The work was done in co-operation with: DEMETER, Lapin Kulta, Lohjan Laatuautot, Off Road Center, Land Rover Finland, Land Rover Japan, EMA -group, Benefon ESC!, Sonera, Haglöfs and Lundén Foods.