Spirit of Paimio

The fourth floor of the Paimio Sanatorium became a lively laboratory of urban design when students from Aalto University gathered to envision a new, fictional city in just four days. The architectural workshop Incomplete City provided a chance for the students to sharpen their skills in city planning and collaboration. It also marked a significant milestone in the sanatorium’s evolving role as a hub for international academic exchange, innovation and learning.

What makes a good city? This seemingly simple, but increasingly complicated, question was at the centre of Incomplete City, an architectural exercise held at the Paimio Sanatorium in October. Over four days, 13 students from Aalto University’s urban planning programme immersed themselves in the challenge of creating an entire fictional city – one that would combine the best sides of cities and rural areas, withstand rising sea levels and provide quality of life for a diverse population.

Incomplete City is a globally recognized architectural exercise, inviting participants design a city through collaborative drawing. This was the first time the program took place in Finland, bringing its renowned creative and playful approach to urban design to the iconic Paimio Sanatorium.

Originally devised by Marco Ferrari, Joseph Grima and Dan Hill at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture in 2016, Incomplete City has subsequently travelled the world, becoming a regular fixture of design curricula at architecture schools from Michigan to Melbourne.

“We usually conduct Incomplete City studios in highly urban locations, so to do this one at Paimio Sanatorium is particularly intriguing,” said Dan Hill, Director at the Melbourne School of Design, who guided the students through the exercise. “Our students are working on new visions for Helsinki neighbourhoods, so we expect the collective drawing to be Helsinki-ish but also Paimio-ish, somehow. A bit of the forest in the city, or vice versa, perhaps finding something new. It also allows students to reimagine urban wellbeing, drawing from landscape as much as building, perhaps, and articulating new relationships with both.”

Designing Through Collaboration

The purpose of the exercise is to explore visions for the future of cities and encourage innovative thinking through collaboration. The students work in teams, starting by constructing a “Library of Urban Elements”. These building blocks of a city, from benches and trees to more complex urban infrastructure, are then gradually integrated into a larger cityscape to explore broader urban relationships like infrastructure, diversity and communities.

During the first days of the workshop in Paimio, table after table was filled with skillfully hand-drawn cut-outs of pine trees, electric car charge points, trams, cars, stairs, greenhouses, padel courts, ice-cream trucks, playgrounds and much more. Gradually, these elements were put up on the wall, where a new city began to emerge.

For many of he students, working in this way was a new experience, pushing them to work together and build new environments from scratch, instead of designing elements or buildings to fit existing urban areas.

“The exercise is as much about practicing collaboration as it is architecture; or rather, recognising that complex collaboration is one of the core attributes of meaningful design work. It is also much fun, a playful and interactive way of embodying creative work and urban imaginaries,” said Hill.

Building Paimio’s Future as a Learning Hub

The Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, which works to develop new uses for Alvar and Aino Aalto’s iconic former hospital building, sees the inclusion of the Incomplete City workshop at this year’s Spirit of Paimio conference as a key step in shaping the sanatorium’s new identity as a platform for learning and creation.

“It aligns deeply with the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation’s strategic objectives to foster educational activities and strengthen collaboration with universities,“ said the foundation’s curator Joseph Grima.

At Aalto University, the workshop is part of a larger project focused on revitalization, where incompleteness is viewed as a natural outcome of the forces that constantly reshape cities and spaces

“We are collaborating with the City of Helsinki to reinvigorate its centre, and are happy to simultaneously contribute to Paimio Sanatorium finding a new spot in the sunlight,” said Antti Ahlava, Professor of Emergent Design Methodologies at Aalto University.

The workshop’s interactive, community-oriented design approach encourages participants to co-create and reimagine spaces – an approach that resonates deeply with the foundation’s mission to preserve and extend the legacy of Paimio Sanatorium in an innovative and dynamic way.

“By facilitating this hands-on approach, the foundation enhances its educational offerings but also positions itself as a dynamic hub for academic and professional exchange in architecture and urban planning,” said Grima.