Urban Fade

Competition entry for Koivusaari Idea Competition, to create a new city district on a small island just outside Helsinki, Finland.


View from the archipelago


Urban plan


The new district

In Koivusaari you will experience a great urban diversity on a
relatively small island; a dense city core that gradually fades
to smaller premises and that eventually becomes archipelago.
The island becomes a distillation of the best qualities
that each one of the urban typologies has to offer; the intense
city center with offi ces, shops and services close to the bus
and subway station, the medium sized town with more green
areas, restaurants and residential units, the small town that
lies almost in a park situation and fi nally the archipelago with
public piers and pavilions with good life activities.
By keeping it dense, the distances between the new districts
parts is kept short and you don’t have to do so much fi llings
around the island to get a lively city area. This is good for both
the environment and from a economical point of view.


Overlooking the island

Almost every residential unit has a sea view and they also have
a glass room that cantilevers from the façade, creating a new
typology, a deluxe room where you have a panorama over the
ocean and where you can enjoy the cityscape to the fullest.
The city grid is highly effi cient and has many advantages; it
creates lines of views, it has many options of moving around
in the district and it makes the variation in the building scales
even more dramatic, an optical illusion that enhances the
archipelago backdrop.
Koivusaari is planned to accommodate around 5000 people
and have 2500 working places. The island will have about
200 000 m2 residential space, 75000 m2 office space and
45000m2 business premises that makes a total built floor
space area of 320 000 m2.
The land area is a little bit more than 175000 m2.


Street view


Housing prototypes


Plexi model, partly made on the boat to Helsinki

The jury divided the different proposals into four categories; "Upper Class", "Middle Class", "Lower Middle Class" and "Lower Class".
Apparently we were placed in the "Lower Middle Class" category.

Here is the winner and an Upper Class project according to the Finnish elite thinkers;


Kuunari by Ilja Svärd, the winner and one of the "Upper Class" projects.
Congratulations wishes all of us at the lower middle class office visiondivision.
Hopefully we will one day be as good as you! Inshallah

Bland Vallmo och Tallar

The task was to build 1000 housing units in the outskirt of Mölndal, a commuter town to Gothenburg.
The site is flat and rather undefined and is now the home to Åby horse race arena, the second biggest of its kind in Sweden.
Around the arena is a sprawl of horse stables and enclosed pastures, all this will be relocated to another area in a near future and this will liberate a great deal of land.

To create a notion of identity to the complete new residential area, a vast meadow will function as the visual core in the area.
The houses will cut through the meadow as long piers in a comb-like manner.
In between the apartment structures, there are terrace houses to create a healthy urban mix.

Main posters

The masterplan

The meadow

Housing units at the meadow

The forrest

Housing units at the forrest

Suburb Habibi

City planning for a suburb with a strong identity.


Gamlestadstorget, a suburb to Gothenburg, is changing its infrastructure and connections with the surrounding suburbs and the city.


The strong identity (people, attitude, diversity and density) is preserved and intensified with a new villagelike building.


The building is laid out in a dense way according to the diagram above.

A sprawling compact building programed with diversity and 24H life.
Dense in its first floors and then defragmented on the higher levels.
Like a small village in the suburb, the best of gamlestadstorget collected to a superstructure that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Situated next to a new planned open square, that will also function as a big travel hub for this area, the structure will contrast to it with its windling narrow streets and small shops.

The square is mainly in white shiny medinastone with rubber parts that transforms down to the river and becomes pools, bbq and stages for performances and parties.
one part next to the new railwaystation is lit with extra strong lights so you can play basketball all night long.