How Two Helsinki Architects Transformed a Parking Lot Into a Paradise for Pollinators

The Alusta Pavilion gives birds, bees, and plants a lush habitat—and human visitors a renewed outlook on the natural world.

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Duncan Nielsen

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Welcome to Wildlife Week, an exploration of what happens when nature and home meet.

It seems we’re out of touch. A lot of the time, our homes, offices, and cities are orderly boxes built around more boxes, forming barriers that reduce chaos in favor of control, which leaves us far removed from every other form of life. According to self-described environmental architects Elina Koivisto and Maiju Suomi, that’s no way to live. If we want to design a more sustainable future, they say, we’re going to have to figuratively—and literally—break down the kinds of walls we’ve been conditioned to build.

Positioned between the Design Museum and the Museum for Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, the Alusta Pavilion by Suomi/Koivisto Architects is a roughly 2,100-square-foot parklet for plants, pollinators, and people.

In one example of how we can rekindle a connection with Mother Earth, in June this year, Koivisto and Suomi introduced a pollinator and plant paradise to a parking lot between the Design Museum and the Museum of Finnish Architecture in their hometown of Helsinki. Called the Alusta Pavilion, the pop-up parklet’s exposed framework of clay bricks and wood beams creates an inviting habitat for birds, bees, insects, plants, and fungi, and an unexpected place where human visitors can get up close and personal with a vibrant ecosystem.

While pedestrians who stumble on the project will be pleasantly surprised with the pop of greenery, the pavilion has also served as a starting point for discussions around sustainable building and natural processes in more academic settings: with ecology researchers who helped Suomi and Koivisto translate the needs of plants and insects into a built design; at the Aalto University Department of Design, where Suomi presented the project as part of her doctoral studies; and with kids from a summer camp hosted by the architecture museum.

Now that the pavilion is very much at the whims of Suomi and Koivisto’s "clients"—the pollinators and their plant pals—what happens next is, by design, beyond their control. And that’s where things get interesting. Here, the architects share what went into creating the pavilion, what happens when we hand over agency of the built environment to natural processes, and how connecting with other species, even if just for a moment in the middle of a city, can patch up our relationship with nature.

Elina Koivisto used the pavilion as a test lab for natural materials, stacking clay Poroton bricks by Wienerberger to create alcoves and seating for people, and nooks for critters to nest. Using reclaimed wood runs into a lot of red tape in Helsinki, so for the pergolas, she used virgin pine painted in a natural pigment from Uula Color.

Dwell: You are environmental architects—for those of us scratching our heads, can you explain what that is?

Maiju Suomi:I would say that it’s double sided. I would first refer to Susan Hagen, a British architectural professor who defined the field. She says that if you want architecture to be seen as an environmental act, or as environmental architecture, it should be trying to make the natural environment better in some way—you’re protecting the living conditions of all species. At the same time, it’s not just a practical act, it’s also art. We want to communicate on a symbolic level the responsibility of architecture to create better environments.

Tell us about your latest work, the Alusta Pavilion. How did it take shape? How is it an example of environmental architecture?

Suomi: We wanted to take an urban spot, this parking lot between the museums in Helsinki, and see how we could bring in more life—to add biodiversity where it was lacking. In this case we decided it would be interesting to work with pollinating insects because it’s such an easy way to communicate the interconnectedness of [human] needs with the needs of the other species. So, practically, we wanted to create a space where both pollinating insects could feel well, and at the same time, human beings could feel well.

Elina Koivisto:At the pavilion, there are these benches that run into the vegetation. So you get to decide how much you want to interact with the insects. [Academic] Donna Haraway has a concept, "intimacy without proximity," and that’s something that we kept in mind with the design. We don’t want to create clashes between species, but facilitate coexistence.

Visitors rest on more bricks from Wienerberger, but these were produced in Finland with locally sourced clay. Koivisto and Suomi hand-picked the 3,000 pieces included in the pavilion. Positioned between the Poroton bricks are "furry" raw clay blocks with fibrous crushed reeds made by a student, Oliver Müller.

How did you choose to build between two museums? Who is the pavilion meant for?

Suomi: We built between the museums because it’s a place where people are often open to new ideas. They can take in this kind of thinking—how we’re challenging deeply rooted conceptions of humanity’s place in the world. But then at the same time, we wanted to reach a lot of professionals who are making decisions in their work life. Our big goal here has been to wake up design professionals to see that when we’re building something, we’re operating in places that are already alive. They aren’t blank spaces with no life. We’re always performing an intervention in a really complicated place that already has its own processes.

How are things going? Are people and insects interacting with the pavilion in ways you had or hadn’t expected?

Koivisto: The Museum of Finnish Architecture organized a summer school for teenagers, these week-long camps where they can learn about architecture. There was a girl from the camp who said that normally she’s afraid of insects that sting, but at the pavilion, she felt comfortable. I think it’s because we created so much vegetation. There are all these flowering plants around. The insects have such a good buffet there that they have no need to disturb the people.

Suomi: And we’ve had a lot of people saying, Okay, what should I plant in my garden if I wanna do the same thing? Like, I have this big garden, but I’ve never thought that I could do this. And then we can say, Okay, here is a list of 50 plants that you could easily grow at home. And they get other ideas, like bringing in clay for different birds to build their nests, or leaving the decaying wood in the ground instead of taking it away. These are really small but practical things.

The pavilion’s different plant species flower at different times from April through October, serving a range of pollinators and insects.

Clearly the pavilion is highly intentional from a design standpoint. But the plants and pollinators make it this kind of living, growing experiment. How do you reconcile elements that were within your control with those outside of it?

Suomi: That really gets at the core of this. With urban environments, we’re very used to the idea that humans have to be in control. And as architects, that’s what we do—we control things. We wanted to challenge that by giving away agency to the non-human participants of this project. So we see it as, we’ve built the place to some degree; we brought in the clay structures and the soil. And then we "invited" the participants, like the plants and the decaying wood with the fungi, and the insects and the people. But we designed it to change as natural processes occur. The way we see it, the space only becomes whole when the plants grow.

It’s this test to ourselves and the people experiencing it to see how we respond to that lack of control. Like, how does it feel if we view the space not as something we make once—it’s intact, and then it’s broken—but as these processes. We wanted to explore the idea of how things gradually change: decay, death, and then rebirth.

The Poroton bricks, as well as the rest of the materials in the pavilion, can easily be repurposed or reused once the pop-up ends in October of 2023.

Did that thinking apply to your choice of materials?

Koivisto: Yes, we were thinking about the entire life of the materials. Where do they come from and where do they go afterward? We chose clay and used some wood, but we wanted to use clay because the process of harvesting it is gentle on the environment. And then when you build with raw clay, you can basically take it back to the the pit where you took it from.

How should visitors to the pavilion view themselves within the context of these natural processes? What do you hope they’ll walk away with?

Koivisto: In the future, we need to get used to these processes if we want to continue living on this planet. Instead of creating something that’s new and glossy, and then as you said, Maiju, it becomes broken so we tear it down and start over, we should get used to architecture that can change over time. This is what it will take to live more sustainably.

Suomi: We want to challenge the culture between humans and nature, and see ourselves as a part of these processes—as part of a network where everything affects everything. We need to look critically at this hierarchical idea that we’re above nature. We need to be humbler, and acknowledge that our actions affect all other actions. The pavilion challenges that hierarchical thinking, it creates basis for a new kind of attitude toward the natural world that we’re very much a part of.