Helsinki South Harbour

Project: South Harbour
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Client: City of Helsinki
Size: 70 Acres
Budget: n/a
Timeline: 2011

Helsinki’s South Harbor is presently a working facility—a highly fragmented, disorienting tangle of streets, trolley lines, ferry queues, staging zones and restricted access areas comprising a limited-access water’s edge. Even the harbour’s most successful public facility, the Market, is dominated by automobile parking and servicing, leaving the public realm of the South Harbour a residual afterthought. Our proposal takes this existing situation and transforms it through six primary operations that place a priority on the harbour’s civic space:

1. Vertically separate port service traffic (below) from local traffic (grade)
2. Extend the city to the water
3. Create continuous, legible public waterfront access
4. Animate the waterfront through a collection of discrete landscape types
5. Provide generous, over-scaled bespoke urban furnishing
6. Anchor the new waterfront with four cultural icons.

Individually, these are not radical moves. Collectively, however, these operations create a complete reorientation and re-imagination of the role of the South Harbor within Helsinki. The result is a generous, active, spectacular public realm that takes advantage of Helsinki and Finlandʼs unique cultural, physiological, and climatic heritage to create a timeless environment that will become the cityʼs most recognizable and important public space.