Alusta pavilion, built on the courtyard of the Design Museum and the Museum of Finnish Architecture, will be open for public from June 2022 to October 2023. The project explores nature-culture relations and offers a place for encounters between humans and non-human animals in urban space. The pavilion functions as a platform for environmental discourse, both on the level of its form and materiality, and the different activities which take place there. It comprises a pollinator friendly meadow and structures made with clay in its different forms; unfired and fired brick and rammed earth. Alusta is realized by a multidisciplinary group lead by Suomi/Koivisto architects.

Alusta offers a space for thinking about our place as part of a more than human community. The pavilion takes its form through collaboration of plants, human visitors, natural processes and passage of time. The clay and wood structures offer habitats for people, plants and insects. Fungi take part in maintaining the natural cycles and offer shelter and nutrition to insects. In collaboration with ecologists from Helsinki University, the project explores increasing biodiversity in the urban environment and demonstrating the importance of soil and its microbes for the wellbeing of the ecosystem. Human visitor can participate in caring for the soil and plants and in building the pavilion. There will be clay workshops for families, architectural summer schools for youth and seminar programme on biodiversity and the built environment during summer 2022.