SIILO
Sara Hildén Art Museum — Tampere, Finland

International Architectural Competition

The Red City — From the Origins of Art to the Architecture of Collective Memory
Red clay.
The earth from which some of humanity’s earliest artistic expressions emerged, when prehistoric artists used natural pigments to leave the first traces of their imagination on cave walls.
Thousands of years later, the same material became the bricks of Tampere’s factories, shaping the industrial landscape of a city whose identity was forged through labour, industrialisation and social struggle.
Tampere, The Red City.

Red as the colour of the clay. Red as the colour of the bricks. Red as the symbol of the workers’ movement and the political history that shaped the city’s collective identity.
The geological structure of clay introduces another layer to this narrative. The stratification of phyllosilicates and the triangular geometries suggested by their molecular organisation become the generative principles of the museum’s architecture, establishing a dialogue with the distinctive roofline of the historic Finlayson industrial complex.

Matter becomes geometry. Geometry becomes structure. Structure becomes architecture.
SIILO emerges from this sequence as a contemporary reinterpretation of the industrial silo: a sixty-metre-high vertical museum conceived as a new landmark for Tampere.
Its compact footprint preserves the surrounding urban space, while a transparent entrance hall connects the historic Finlayson building, the new museum and Wilhelm von Nottbeck Park.
From the first gestures of artistic expression to the collective struggles of industrial society, SIILO transforms the memory of matter and the history of human creativity into a new architectural identity for the Red City.

In the swift passage through modernity the relationship with historical continuity has often been lost. 

Thus, the complexity of formal and spatial schemas, in character with traditional architecture and the corresponding urban design, gives way to simplification which is void of memory. 

The layers that made up and broke down the architectural space of traditional Korean architecture become huge blind and dumb surfaces in the anonymous residential buildings of the new city. 

The same layers in the site cut through the volumetric masses of the incinerator and set the scene for the transformation that follows. 

In this evolutionary process/project which evolves into a cultural center, the aim is to restore the relationship with memory in a process of anamnesis that combines the simplification of the layers with the complexity of their origin. 

As if taken from an old postcard featuring the roofs of Gwangju, these translucent pages reveal the simplicity of the spaces they contain and the complexity of the relationships between the several and diverse functions that animate the library. 

Combining complexity and semplicity

1

Suggestions

“La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. 

Comme des longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent…”

“Nature is a temple in which living pillars 
Sometimes give voice to confused words; 
Man passes there through forests of symbols 
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance 
In a deep and tenebrous unity, 
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, 
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond …”

(Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences”, from “The Flowers of Evil”, 1861)

2

The concept

A vibration that produces the sound. MOVEMENT.

A compositional grid, RHYTHM, that restrains the continuous change of the space shape made by the vibration of the bodies close to each other’s.

MUSIC

Sounds and silences, ordered according a precise rule.

The National Concert Hall “Tautos Namai”

Full and empty composed in the rhythm grid

3

The Site TAURAS HILL

“La nature est un temple où … The Rhythm Grid … de vivants pilier
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses paroles”
…
Sometimes gives voice to confused words  …“SOUNDS”

Tautos Namai is part of the nature, it can be crossed by passing through the gaps, like in the forest, giving continuity to the park.

Through the rhythm, the sounds = Transparency, Continuity

TAUTOS NAMAI, the National Concert Hall on the top of Tauras Hill,
in the park between the trees 

• A park on the front
• A park on the back
• The city at the foot of the hill

4

The Building

The RHYTHM Grid

It composes and it keeps together  the Voids – Transparent spaces and the Solids – Closed spaces

The Voids – Transparent spaces give continuity to the park that ascends Taura Hill

The MOVEMENT that generates the sound deforms the space, that is the RHYTHM