New Colossi
2020
An image report commissioned by Arkkitehti magazine on monumental building projects in Helsinki that represent a new scale.
Approaching Helsinki's stone city from the east, the traveler in the future will first encounter the monumental eight towers of Redi. The project is massive not only in height but also in the ground it occupies at street level. These proportions have gradually swollen since the city's plans over ten years ago, as Lee Marable pointed out in Arkkitehti magazine 6/2019.
Arriving by train, one now passes through the huge structure of Tripla, which rises high above its neighboring buildings, as if in a 2:1 scale to the buildings of Itä-Pasila. Rem Koolhaas, the founder and star architect of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, who consulted on the concept plan for the Tripla competition phase, wrote about "bigness" in his canonical – and also large – book "S, M, L, XL" back in 1995. "Bigness" is a new form of architecture that no longer needs the city because it has become urban in itself due to its inherent complexity. Bigness coexists with the classical city but can no longer form a relationship with it.
Big things have long fascinated and caused wonder. In antiquity, the Colossus of Rhodes stood in the city's harbor, welcoming travelers from afar. Its selection as one of the seven wonders of the world was based on its exceptionally large size.
