Domus Arctica -säätiö will build an 8-storey CLT, cross laminated timber -frame structure student apartment building, DAS Kelo, in the Riihipellonpuisto –area (diagonally opposite to the university) in Rovaniemi. The goal is to build a communal apartment building with a small ecological footprint. The premises for the planning and building have been the strategy for circular economy by the city of Rovaniemi, the principles of sustainable development, innovations by digitalization, and alternative sources for energy production. The construction is aimed to begin on the plot in June 2018 and the aimed date of completion is July 15, 2019.
The plot is a part of the Riihipellonpuisto partnership-building plan that has been created together with the city of Rovaniemi and the schools and academies in the area. The renewed plan includes some of the already existing DAS buildings: The Jukola brothers, Venla, Erävalkeat and Vellikellot. The plan allows complementary construction, heightening the existing apartment buildings, a new plot for an apartment building in Korvanaukio park, and one business lot alongside Rantavitikantie for DAS. The DAS office building was separated into its own plot, which enables business and office building construction, and facilitates nearby services. The building plan also changed the parking spot regulations, enabled car sharing, and created parking areas that serve building blocks instead of individual buildings. The plan also enables building a walkway between the Lapland UAS and the University of Lapland. This walkway will join the academies and the area even more tightly into a campus area. The demand for the walkway is very high.
The new building will include 103 studio apartments, and communality and circular sharing economy will be facilitated with, for example, shared areas, and shared means of transportation and booking systems that support their use. There will also be a livingroom for the tenants on the ground floor, which includes a laundry room with 5 washing machines and a tumble dryer, and common space for get-togethers, lounging and for the shared items tenants can borrow. A sauna with a meeting-/clubroom will be built on the top floor and an amazing view will be offered by a cooling balcony. There will be a space for bike maintenance, and for storing shared bikes on the ground floor.
There will also be 271 square meters of office space that will be used by the foundation, and storage rooms, and technical facilities.
Kelo architecture
The wooden apartment building is called ”Kelo” which aptly describes its essence. The building will be coloured in a kelohonka (Finnish for a long-dead silvery-gray hundreds-of-years old pine tree) -shade of gray. Warm shades of wooden surface will be included in ceiling surfaces and the flooring of the staircase. The architecture is grandiosely minimalistic with its roof shapes and the entrance façade, which will be emphasized with a striking tone of blue. Every apartment will come with a French-style balcony and different colour-films in the windows, which will bring colour to the façade even during the darker times of the year.
A carbon foodprint as minimal as possible
A minimal carbon footprint will be achieved by using wood as the primary construction material, by efficient energy consumption, and solar panels. Apart from the ground floor, the building will be constructed with cross-laminated glued timber board. The wooden space elements will be brought to the site built ready and they will be joined together with a tight schedule.
The 8-storey building is by its layout as efficient as it can be and this minimizes the building and maintenance costs. Replacing concrete structures with wooden ones has been the goal from the beginning. Constructing buildings from wood helps containing climate change. The effects of climate change in the Arctic region and its nature and environment are especially dramatic. For fire safety, many of the surfaces will be covered with plasterboard structures. The building will also come equipped with a sprinkler system.
Co-operation and research
Co-operation and research has been and will be done in regards of this building project. During the planning phase, tenants and students had a chance to give statements regarding the colour scheme, fixed furnishing and overall outlook of the building in co-operation with the Lapland UAS and their Kickstart-pilot “The technologies of a smart living environment”. The interface was created for one apartment, which included the space plan made by the architect, fixed furniture, and the equipment added by maintenance experts. The students looked at the space by looking at the interface through 3D virtual glasses and commented their observations. Using AR was seen to bring added value to user-based apartment building planning as the project was conducted.
Napapiirin Energia ja Vesi will provide the wooden apartment building with remotely-read cold- and warm water meters and a remote-read service. A shared electric-car service and a public charging port will be provided for the tenants to support the principle of communality. Neve will provide the building with a solar power system and the electricity provided by it will be stored. District heating will be the primary heating system for the building and absorbing heat from the sewage water will support this.
The Lapland UAS has applied funding for their Dwell – Smart housing community –research project, which will include DAS Kelo being built in 2018-2019 as the primary conducting environment. The decision for the funding is expected during this spring. The primary function of the research is, as a product of multi-disciplinary, to advance the chances of using the building as efficiently as possible for the building’s tenants and the maintenance providers. The main themes of the research are communal users, smart maintenance and intelligent systems. The goal of the project is to research and develop the usage of smart systems in building industry and advance communality in living. The project aims to create an open facility user interface on top of which different types of software can be built to enhance facility maintenance and resource efficiency for various agents. The project is supposed to be conducted in multi-disciplinary co-operation between Lapland UAS and the University of Lapland in which three themes are emphasized: Design, Technology and Business.
DAS has ordered from Atlastica point cloud description done by drone of the area. This makes possible to visualize the planned house in the "real surroundings" an making a virtual animation.
For more information and contact
Domus Arctica –säätiö Kirsti Saviaro, Managing Director kirsti.saviaro@das.fi, puhelin 040 5534780
Lasse Kontiola, Board Chairman lasse.kontiola@rovaniemi.fi, puh. 0400 694 233
City of Rovaniemi Tarja Outila, Architect for the City tarja.outila@rovaniemi.fi, puh. 040 7012435
Arkkitehtityöhuone Artto Palo Rossi Tikka Oy
Aaro Artto, architect, aaro.artto@aprt.fi, puhelin 050 3835 196
Lapland UAS Antti Sirkka, project leader, antti.sirkka@lapinamk.fi, puh. 040 6740590
Napapiirin Energia ja Vesi Oy
Kristian Gullsten, CEO; kristian.gullsten@neve.fi, puh. 0400 674 400