The Wood Pavilion in Helsinki Made Beautiful With Lunawood’s Thermowood

A new, open space will be unveiled today in the heart of Helsinki for residents of the city: The Säie (meaning ‘strand’) wooden pavilion. Built in front of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, the pavilion offers a space for the summer for workshops, lectures, eating, relaxing, and many other types of activities and gatherings.

‘The Säie pavilion combines the traditional forms of garden structures in a novel way with an image of a city-centre forest. The pavilion is a structure of bent thin lattices, which rises from a platform of thermowood made from wide, glued planks,’ says Pekka Heikkinen, Professor at Aalto University’s Department of Architecture.

The thermowood floor is made with Lunawood’s new, extra-wide LunaLam glue-laminated wood panelling. ‘We have worked in collaboration with Lunawood in the past – for example, in connection with the Housing Fair. Their wide, glued decking board was a new and interesting product for
this project,’ says Heikkinen.

The pavilion was designed and implemented by a group of students in the international Wood in Architecture and Construction course. The group comprises 12 Aalto University Department of Architecture students, from eight countries.

In addition to the thermowood flooring, some of the benches in the space are made from Lunawood’s thermowood. The benches have been designed and manufactured by students at the Aalto University Department of Design. According to the university’s Lecturer Karola Sahi, all of the benches are different: ‘One of the thermowood benches is like a ship’s keel, and the seat of another bench has a smooth and streamlined shape, looking just like a piece of driftwood. A third one has a circular lath design, and its two corners are up in the air so that you can swing on the bench.’

Entrance to the Säie pavilion is free, and it is open until 23 August.