How to Carve a Giant

How to Carve a Giant proposes an architecture capable of keeping safe contemporary forms of knowledge by taking a mantle of a folk story that carves its way through the urban fabric of Helsinki. The building is a repository storing knowledge in a vast inter-generational bid to prevent the loss of information.

Numerous redevelopment proposals for Pasila have all been met with scepticism by the local community. The response advocates an architecture that is familiar and transcends time. Folklore, mythology and their possible translation into architecture are used as design strategies to explore the preservation and dissemination of knowledge.

The mythical poem Kalevala becomes a framework for invention. The metaphors of the Giant, the Fox, the Blacksmith, and the Bear became a testing grounds for knowledge storing and carving technologies.

The project considers how digital preservation made possible via DNA encoding has rendered knowledge invisible to the naked eye. That consequently posits architecture as decipherer and uses ornament, inscription, shifts in scale and an architectural language native to Finland to facilitate the dialogue.

This epic folk-tale brings together a range of cosmic forces into a fabricated urban topography; from the mineral to the mythical and the mortal to the timeless.

A project by Sonia Magdziarz

I have special thanks for Dr Penelope Haralambidou, Keiichi Matsuda, Michael Tite, Kevin Pollard and Egmontas Geras.

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