Hyytiälä forest research station

Helsinki University’s Hyytiälä forest research station is dedicated to continuous education and research in forestry and climate sciences and already has a lengthy history as an international scientific centre.

Read the article in Finnish here.

Built from solid wood, the research station’s new main building has facilities for accommodation, education, and conferences and serves as a so-called Living Lab for global wooden construction research. The building was designed by Arkkitehdit Rudanko Kankkunen Oy and was completed in 2023. All the new buildings blend in with the existing smallscale structures, adding their own contemporary layer.

A design competition for the complex was organised in 2020. Together with R+K and Siklatilat, the design team won with their proposal “Koto”, a Finnish word for “home” or “safe haven”. The name epitomises this peaceful complex, which provides researchers and students with a home-like base surrounded by forest.

The new solid wood buildings replicate the humble scale of their historical surroundings. The main building’s mass is divided into four pavilions, each surrounded by terraces with direct access to the accommodations. They feel much like cabins in the woods with minimalist structures where every square metre is put to practical use. Each small room has two beds, with privacy ensured by tucking one into the loft space under the roof. The rooms have CLT surfaces inside.

Sustainable construction was a natural starting point in Hyytiälä, and the architects set a remarkable 150-year goal for the design’s life cycle. The entire design team pondered this goal collectively and eventually decided on pinching the recipe of Hyytiälä’s over 100-year-old neighbours: galvanised gable roofs, long protective eaves, a high stone plinth, and solid wood structures.

The upcoming centuries will tell how well the construction of today competes with that of a hundred years ago.

Wood is present in the frame’s large CLT elements and in the interior and exterior cladding. The wooden façade is not tinted, but instead treated with iron sulphate to accelerate its natural grey patina. Indoors, the solid wood elements have been left visible as much as possible. The glulam beams of the dining room ceiling in the middle of the research station also support the building’s glass walls, forming a visually impressive continuum. The dining room floor is hard-wearing vertical wooden parquet, and the parquet in the accommodations is also suited for residential use. Acoustic ceiling panels made of spruce chips and cement complement the interior’s wooden architecture. The subfloors and roofs are insulated with wood fibre, whereas the exterior walls are solid wood with no separate insulation.

The Living Lab research group at Helsinki University’s Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry contributed to the design, which includes facilities and technology for future studies into the life cycle of wooden construction.

Technical solutions

The new building in Hyytiälä is designed for a life cycle of 150 years. This goal required no fancy technical innovations but instead a new way of thinking and an appreciation for construction methods over 100 years old. Set for demolition, the site’s existing buildings from the 1970s had solutions that made them beyond repair. Entire building frames would have required an overhaul. To avoid a similar situation 50 years from now, the team took a different approach.

Sustainable solutions were easier to find than expected: built from logs in the early 1910s, the listed buildings of the old Hyytiälä research station were still standing. While no one knows which individual construction products of today will last 150 years, the buildings next door had endured over 100 years. Proven to stand the test of time, their solutions were copied for the new structures. Besides technical solutions, the team sought architecture that would still combine form and function after 150 years.

This prioritisation of a 150-year life cycle and the borrowing from old to new were central to the project. The new complex focuses on quality and longevity and on building less rather than more: construction was split into phases, allowing one pavilion to be built later. The new complex is smaller in size than its predecessors from the 1970s. Every inch is thought out carefully to ensure quality and a long life.

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