Take a 1.5 x 1.1 meter sheet of birch particle board and design a spatial object or piece of furniture for a student apartment. No joints may be nailed, bolted or glued, only plug-and-socket connections are allowed. With this exciting project brief, for which there are no easy solutions, 34 IMIAD students started working in Lahti during the international workshop.
After previous workshops that reached out even into urban planning challenges in the pulsating metropolis Istanbul, students from Stuttgart, Edinburgh, Lugano, Istanbul and Lahti were asked to refocus on a scale of 1:1. In the context of the relatively quiet and small Lahti, a variety of fascinating prototypes were presented: from a folding screen to wine shelf, from desk container to rocking chair, there was the complete spectrum of solutions, all individual solutions developed from the same original two-dimensional material. In a stark contrast to previous workshops, this time in Lahti the focus was a real implementation of a design idea. The architectural sights of the seventh largest city in Finland with about 100,000 inhabitants were visited: Eliel Saarinens city hall (1912), Alvar Aaltos “Church of the Cross” (1969/1979) as well as the Sibelius Concert Hall by Hannu Tikka and Kimmo Lintula (2000) on the shores of Lake Vesijärvi.
