Credits: Markku Hedman, Professor, Architect SAFA – http://www.a-mh.fi/

Summer-Container is a movable timber-framed holiday cabin, operating on the matchbox principle. The purpose of the project was to study temporary dwelling, the relationship of building with nature and adaptability and varied use of a small leisure home. The project has also studied the uses of domestic lumber and plywood products and glued structural joints.

Summer-Container is a small building with an ephemeral and unsettled spirit. It reflects contemporary social, environmental and cultural reality and it meets the needs of a present-day individual inhabitant. In addition this project is utilised to examine the characteristics of sustainable development in housing design and construction. At the same time Summer-Container is deeply rooted into the history of Finnish architecture. It is a reinterpretation of a conventional Finnish holiday cabin. It makes use of materials typically utilized in industry and transforms them into a restful summer-home. It also creates a variable structure, which is able to accommodate itself into a traditional Finnish countryside or forest.

During storage and transportation, Summer-Container forms a tightly-shut wooden cube. It can be moved to its intended site, for example, on a trailer towed by a car or on a sled pulled by a snowmobile. Before use, shutters over the windows and door are opened and the living accommodation inside the cube is pushed out. The solid wooden cube is transformed into a colorful holiday cabin for two, with through-views and a varied appearance. It can be used as a base on an island for fishing trips, as a site cabin for foresters or as a young couple’s first year-round holiday home.

Summer-Container contains a kitchen area, a work-table, a convertible living / sleeping section and storage space. It can be outfitted for example with a kerosene-fuelled cooker, oven and heater, and also with a water container and a sink. The electricity required by the house is produced with solar panels or a wind-driven generator. All facades, including the roof as well as inner walls and ceiling are different kind of plywood boards, which are coated with phenolic resin laminate or film. These boards are more typically used as flooring panel in transport vehicles, industrial floors, and work platforms or for concrete formwork. A 50-70 mm thick board of polystyrene is used as insulation between the inner and outer boards of plywood. The insulation boards are glued to outer and inner plywood boards to create a solid panel. These prefabricated panels are then attached to the wooden frame. Selected colors reflect the colors of Finnish forests during different seasons of a year.

Project Title: Kesä Kontti / Summer-Container
Year Established: June 2000
Location: Movable / no fixed location, originally presented at the annual Finnish Summer-housing Exhibition in Tuusula, Finland
Floor Area Closed 4,5 / opened for use 8,0 sqm
Architect: Markku Hedman
Architectural Firm: Architects M.H. Coop.

Quellen/Copyright:
Text and Images by courtesy of Markku Hedman, Professor, Architect SAFA
http://www.a-mh.fi/

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This offers a good basis both to renew architecture towards more sustainable solutions as well as to conceive a home or a housing area as an ever-changing built landscape. If small-scale projects help us to understand buildings as momentary, it also makes it possible to manifest an attitude about life spans that link both the building methods and the ways of living. At the same time, the adaptability and possibility to complement a home so that it more easily corresponds with the changing situation and the individual needs of the resident may become a natural part of building houses.

Text by Markku Hedman, Professor, Architect SAFA
http://www.a-mh.fi/

This is a short description of the background of the project “kesä kontti /summer container”

Photo by Markku Hedman

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