Tampere Travel and Service Centre

Location: Tampere, Finland

Client: The City of Tampere, the Finnish Transport Agency, the VR-Group and Senate Properties

Date: 2014 Restricted Competition

Total Area: 100,000m2

Budget: €340 million

Team credits:

AZPML: Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal, Manuel Eijo, Iñigo Arrien, Pablo de Sola

Architects Lahdelma & Mahlamäki: Rainer Mahlamäki, Ilmari Lahdelma,Teemu Seppälä

WSP Finland: Terhi Tikkanen-Lindström, Björn Silfverberg

CBRE

Renders: Beauty and the Bit

The image of silos is also resonant with Tampere’s industrial past and the Tammerkoski Rapids. The flowing water body surrounded by industrial containers has been a central reference for our proposal. The project has been conceived as a collection of vertical volumes that contain different types of urban activity. These new silos are landing on larger socles of public program which act as interfaces between the programs contained in these new vertical structures, and the public realm.

The urban containers that constitute our proposal are treated as crystalline, unstable volumes, to emphasize the dynamic nature of the station’s surrounding.  The relationship to the Tammerkoski Rapids as the origin of Tampere as a city is again relevant here. The industrial origins of Tampere are due to the rush of water between lakes Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi which nurtured the demands for power of this emerging city. Our attempt here has been to capture this dynamic spirit of the natural milieu of Tampere in the architecture that surrounds the Station, the new epicentre of dynamism of the new Tampere. Hence, the vertical containers that dot the future urban landscape around the station will have been designed as crystallized bits of the energy that flows through the station. So is the canopy of the station, whose geometry is designed as a resonance with the ripples of the Rapids stream.

While the containers are systematically square in plan, with a central vertical circulation core in order to provide the most flexible and dividable floor plate, they have been designed with an anti metric, tapering on every corner, which generates an effect of instability and lightness.

The Station Square is the architectural device which will connect seamlessly the urban ground level with the new underground connective tissue of retail and amenities: two large, open-air auditoria, carved on the plaza surface, and a new underground tunnel.