The Vessel: New Museum + Science Center
Architecture + Urban Design, Oulu, Finland
The Vessel, a mass-timber Museum of Culture + Science in Oulu, Finland, is a cultural building extension and a major work of public infrastructure. Raised above a floorscape and network of public spaces, it is an inhabited urban roof and canopy: a civic object activating cultural production, exhibition, and encounters, integrating existing buildings, public pathways, and creating a gateway to the Oulujoki historical ensemble and estuary.
On its ground floor the New Museum is a vibrant public space - sequences of glazed entrance, education, commercial and workshop spaces; enclosed, parking, and winter gardens; plazas, service areas, bike clusters; multiple crossroads and pedestrian arcades. It radically transformations a degraded, generic public parking lot in Oulu’s cultural core. On its main floor - 6m above ground level - the project is a hollow wooden Vessel, a light-filled attic space beneath a custom shingle roof, forming a spectacular space of cultural experimentation, flexible exhibition, work, and performance. Conceived as a minimum footprint, low exposure building with an expanded, levitaing urban figure, the Vessel’s keel is held by grids of vaulted timber columns, and by earthen mounds.
Design Principal: Petros Babasikas
Designers: Ray Zhang, Yi Zhou, Jia Mi, Ideh Khadjevand, George Wang
Structural + Environmental Engineering: Valia Rompou Co07 - 10.2022