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Index

Marco Casagrande Biography 4

Land(e)scape 6

60 MINUTE MAN 10

POTEMKIN 14

Organic Layer Taipei 18

Post Industrial Fleet 22

Obihiro Walking Street 26

FUTURE PAVILLION 30

YOU-YUAN 34

CICADA 38

RUIN ACADEMY 42

FLOATING SAUNA 46

1000 WHITE FLAGS 50

Biography

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Marco Casagrande is a Finnish Architect born in 1971

in Turku, Finland. He graduated from the Helsinki

University of Technology Department of Architecture

in 2001. From the early stages of his career Casagrande

started to mix architecture with other disciplines of

art and science landing with a series of ecologically

conscious architectural installations around the world. From 1999 to the present time, he has created 62 rich

original and radical works in 13 years.

The widely published works have been exhibited

three times in the Venice Architecture Biennale

(2000, 2004 and 2006) and in Havana Biennale 2000,

Firenze Biennial 2001, Yokohama Triennial2001,

Montreal Biennial 2002, Puerto Rico Biennial 2002,

Demeter Hokkaido 2002, Alaska Design Forum 2003,

Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 2003, Taipei on the Move

2004, London Architecture Biennial 2004, Sensoria

Melbourne 2004, Taiwan Design Expo 2005, Urban

Flashes Mumbai 2006, 7-ELEVEN City 2007, World

Architecture Festival 2009, Hong Kong & Shenzhen

Bi-City Biennial 2009 and Victoria & Albert Museum

2010 among others.

The works have been awarded in the Architectural

Review’s Emerging Architecture 1999, Borromini

Award 2000, Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2001,

Lorenzo Il Magnifico Award 2001, La Nuit Du Livre

Award 2006, World Architecture Community Awards

2009, World Architecture Festival Award 2009,

Architectural Review House Award 2010 and World

Architecture Community Awards 2010 competitions.

Casagrande’s works and teaching are moving freely in-

between architecture, urban and environmental design

and science, environmental art and circus adding up

into cross-over architectural thinking of «commedia

dell’architettura», a broad vision of built human

environment tied into social drama and environmental

awareness. «There is no other reality than nature». He

views architects as design shamans merely interpreting

what the bigger nature of the shared mind is

transmitting.

Casagrande has been teaching in a numerous

universities since year 2000 including the Tokyo

University Tadao Ando Laboratory, Aalto University,

Helsinki University of Art and Design and Bergen

School of Architecture. He was a visiting professor

at the Taiwanese Tamkang University 2004-2008

and currently runs an independent cross-disciplinary

research centre Ruin Academy in Taipei in cooperation

with the Aalto University’s SGT Sustainable Global

Technologies Centre. Casagrande views cities

as complex energy organisms in which different

overlapping layers of energy flows are determining

the actions of the citizens as well as the development

of the city. By mixing environmentalism and urban

design Casagrande is developing methods of punctual

manipulation of the urban energy flows in order to

create an ecologically sustainable urban development

towards the so-called 3rd Generation City. The

theory of the Third Generation City views the future

urban development as the ruin of the industrial

city, an organic machine ruined by nature including

human nature and urban acupuncture as: a cross-over

architectural manipulation of the collective sensuous

intellect of a city. City is viewed as multi-dimensional

sensitive energy-organism, a living environment.

Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature.

and Sensitivity to understand the energy flows of

the collective chi beneath the visual city and reacting

on the hot-spots of this chi. Architecture is in the

position to produce the acupuncture needles for the

urban chi. and A weed will root into the smallest crack

in the asphalt and eventually break the city. Urban

acupuncture is the weed and the acupuncture point

is the crack. The possibility of the impact is total,

connecting human nature as part of nature. The theory

opens the door for uncontrolled creativity and freedom.

Ruin is something man-made having become part of

nature.

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Land(e)scape

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Architectonic installation, Savonlinna, Finland 1999Casagrande & Rintala

Three abandoned barn houses mounted on wooden shanks in the height of 10 meters in order to give them a slow, majestic walk. Desolate, longing after their farmers, the barns have cut their primeval union with the soil and are now swaying towards the cities of the south. The story ended on a dark night of October when the barns were set on fire by the choreography of dancer Reijo Kela during a traditional slaughterer carnival. The work was commenting the desertion process of Finnish countryside.

Best exhibition in Venice Biennale 2000, L’Architecture D’Anjoud Hui Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture Award 1999

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60 MINUTE MAN

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Architectonic installation for the Venice Biennale 2000 Casagrande & Rintala

In the work Casagrande & Rintala had planted an oak forest into an abandoned barge on top of 60 minutes worth of biologically cleaned and composted human waste from the city of Venice.

They said:We got the invitation to participate in the Venice Biennale 2000. The director of the Biennale architect Massimilliano Fuksas wanted us to realize an architectural installation commenting on the theme of the exhibition: Citta Less Aesthetics, More Ethics.What we wanted was to have an industrial ship and plant a forest inside. Then sail with this ship from Finland to Venice. Our biologist frieds told us that the vegetation would die somewhere around the Biskaya Bay, the climate change would bee too big. "Trees don´t sail"."We ended up in North-Italy with a van with our mobile working crew and started to look after a ship. Eventually we found a barge in the port of Chioggia, some 50 km south of Venice. The barge "Topogigio" was abandoned and filled with dirt and water. We could work with this.All the materials are recycled or borrowed. Even the trees.This is a temporary collage of material streams.Big reward after 7 weeks of work was to sail with the forest and open it up as a public park in Venice.

Best Realization in Venice Biennale 2000, Herbert Muschamp, The New York Time

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POTEMKIN

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Casagrande & RintalaKuramata village, Niijgata province, Japan 2003Etchigo Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial

A permanent park for post industrial meditation in Kuramata village, Japan, invited by Echigo-Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial 2003. A cultivated junk yard as a mixture of a temple and machine. Big industrial park including in and outdoor spaces constructed of 1 inch thick Kawasaki steel plates, 130 m long, 12 m wide, 5 m high. Other materials used: white gravel, Kamagawa River bottom stones, crushed concrete, crushed glass, wood, volcanic sand, concrete, asphalt. The park is situated castle like looking over the Kuramata ricefields and Kamagawa River. Potemkin is blessed and spirituously connected to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan. The working group was put together with operators from Alaska, Norway, England, Japan, Finland and France.

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Organic Layer Taipei

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Casagrande Laboratory, Taipei, Taiwan 2003Commissioned by Taipei City Government. Together with Hsieh Ying Chun, Tamkang University, Taiwan National University, GAPP

Treasure Hill was the first attempt of C-LAB’s urban acupuncture in Taipei. By manipulating the hidden energy flows (Chi in Chinese) of a dying illegal settlement in the middle of Taipei the direction of social destruction was tuned towards survival and construction. The status of the illegal settlement already under bulldozing became that of an urban laboratory of ecologically sustainable urban living. The residents of Treasure Hill are old Kuomintang veterans continuing old Mainland Chinese farming traditions in the middle of a Taiwanese modern city. Like compost the area which not long ago was a shadowy part of the city that nobody wanted to see now has become the most fertile top soil. The urban farmers of Treasure Hill are showing the direction for the Taiwanese cities towards post industrial urban ecological rehabilitation.

The thinking of urban acupuncture is based on the belief that city must be a compost.

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Post Industrial Fleet

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CREW*31Commissioned by Danish Arts Foundations’s Architecture Committee, DenmarkVenice Biennale 2004, Taiwan Design Expo 2005Rebecca Arthy, Christina Sofia Capetillo, Marco Casagrande, Dan Cornelius, Susanne Lund Jensen, Kristine Jensen, Sten Bisgaard Jensen, Lea Andersen, Elina M. Braunstein, Sofie Palm + Martin Metalgod Ross

The Post Industrial Fleet i n t r o d u c e s r e c y c l i n g strategies for industr ial ships and barges out of duty. Today most of the ships find the end of the l ine in India , Pakis tan or Bang ladesh and a re demolished under inhuman working conditions and cost of serious local and global pollution. PIF recycles the ships in their countries of origin as fixed platforms for urban waste treatment i n v e s s e l m a c h i n e r y, communi t y spaces and 3D villages. In Denmark alone 31 of its 100 harbor towns are c losing down the harbor activities due to centralized mega harbors. PIF reactivates the harbor

fronts with water as the new democratic layer of the city. The PIF designs can be applied globally.Without his ships man is just a common ape.

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Obihiro Walking Street

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Casagrande & RintalaObihiro, Hokkaido, Japan, 2002Organized by P3

The citizens of Obihiro had been complaining that the city is boring, that the architects and urban planners had done poor work. We asked the professionals to bring their children in to a gym and then told the children that now you are the architects and your parents are just cheap labor. The children designed and build houses that they could fit inside and then took a walk in the city. Sometimes they would need a break and spontaneous village would take place. Church gossiping with a grocery store for 2 minutes and then moving to another chat. The house behind the child’s house has been deigned by his father. The axis between these two houses is the axis of forgetting. Architect must be a child and forget the forgetting.

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FUTURE PAVILLION

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Casagrande LaboratoryTaiwan Design Expo, Kaoshioung, Taiwan 2005Together with Roan Chin-Yueh and Tamkang University Department of ArchitectureInvited artists and architects located in an abandoned Japanese Army laundry building with four directions to look for the future: Urban Acupuncture, Urban Nomad, Organic Layer and Ocean. Interdisciplinary works moving freely between architecture, environmental art, urban planning and other forms of art and science within the framework of build human environment.

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YOU-YUAN

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Casagrande Laboratory

Glass garden for Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion 2006

The You-Yuan glass garden in the Taiwanese Pavilion is a spatial meditation platform for post urban rehabilitation. The outcome is a mixture of Taiwanese and Finnish interpretations of being present in the circular movement in different levels and nothingness. Basically it is a rock garden with a swing. It is also just a cultivated junkyard – all the material is recycled to form a temporary collage of meeting of material streams trusting that also the city must be a compost. The base layer of the garden is out of crushed glass and the walkways and the swing out of recycled wood. The glass rocks are fantastic accidental side products of glass industry – like pearls in mussels. The flat glass ovens are kept hot for 12 years for glass fabrication after which they will be cooled down for maintenance. Sometimes it happens that during these 12 years the glass plasma inside the oven starts to form a stone or a rock under quite extreme heat and pressure conditions. The clear glass rock is an accident – no man can make this. The swing is something that you see in almost every house in Finland. The family can sit together there and this is where you take a nap in the summers. The slow rocking rhythm, floating, human body as part of circular movement is what we all carry in our genetic memory. It is good to sit in the swing and look at the dark forest.

CICADA

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Casagrande LaboratoryTaipei, Taiwan 2011

Cicada is an organic void in the mechanical texture of modern Taipei, a cocoon for post-industrial metamorphosis for industrial insects. The architecture is based on the Local Knowledge of human scale flexible bamboo structures containing a high level of improvisation and insect mind - Open Form.

The Cicada is situated on a site in central Taipei waiting for development. Mean while it acts as a public sphere for the surrounding neighborhood and as lounge for university workshops and other spontaneous activities - public space.

As one enters the Cicada, the surrounding city disappears. The cocoon is an interior space but totally outside - it is breathing, vibrating, soft and safe. The space will swollow the modern man and will offer him a possibility to travel a thousand years back in order to realize, that the things are the same. Cicada is insect architecture and the space is a public sphere.

Cicada is urban acupuncture for Taipei city penetrating the hard surfaces of industrial laziness in order to reach the original ground and get in touch with the collective Chi, the local knowledge that binds the people of Taipei basin with nature. The cocoon of Cicada is an accidental mediator between the modern man and reality. There is no other reality than nature.

Red Dot Award: Poduct Design 201241

RUIN ACADEMY

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Casagrande LaboratoryTaipei, Taiwan 2010-

Ruin academy is set to re-think the industrial city and the moden man in a box. It organizes workshops and courses for various Taiwanese and international universities including the National Taiwan University Department of Sociology, Tamkang University Department of Architecture, Aalto University Sustainable Global Technologies Centre and Helsinki University of Arts and Design Department of Environmental Art. The research and design tasks move freely in-between architecture, urban design, environmental art and other disciplines of art and science within the general framework of built human environment.

The Ruin Academy occupies an abandoned 5-story apartment building in central Taipei. All the interior walls of the building and all the windows are removed in order to grow bamboo and vegetables inside the house. The professors and students are sleeping and working in mahogany made ad-hoc dormitories and have a public sauna in the 5th floor. All the building is penetrated with 6 inch holes in order to let "rain inside". The Academy is viewed as an example or fragment of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city.

Without his ruins man is just a common ape.45

FLOATING SAUNA

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Casagrande & Rintala + VÄSTLANDS KUNSTAKADEMIETHardangerfjord, Norway 2002Floating sauna for the Rosendahl village by the Hardangerfjord in Norway. The sauna is situated in the center of the village. It glows like a lantern when the things are cooking.

20+10+X World Architecture Community Awards

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1000 WHITE FLAGS

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Casagrande & Rintala

Koli National Park Finland

Landscape installation realized in Koli Nature Park, summer 2000 1000 White Flags made of sheets from mental hospitals on three meters long iron bars mounted to a downhill-skiing range in Koli Nature Park in order to celebrate the madness of the businessmen who cut down the ancient forest in this one of Finlands most beautiful spots. Winning entry of a national competition. A protest against the development of Finland’s Koli National Park as a cross-country ski resort. In the summer of 2000, after collecting unwanted sheets from psychiatric hospitals around the country Casagrande & Rintala made 1000 White Flags to punctuate the verdant landscape of one ski-slope as a gesture of surrender to insanity. The anarchic environmental art work won the first price of the national landscape art competition Settlement and launched the natural restoration process of the national park’s ancient forests.

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