Central St. Martins was recently invited to participate in the ARTS Summer School 2025 hosted by Aalto University in Helsinki. The brief – Spatial Practices Beyond New Construction – asked contributors to imagine spatial practitioner roles in a future where new construction is no longer possible due to its ecological impact. Students and staff were invited from global universities;
Participating staff members from each university contributed to an online symposium held in June consisting of lectures, workshops, reading circles and platforms for discussion. Groups were established amongst the students across the participating institutions which were then carried forward into the two-week summer school in Helsinki.
During August on-site activities were based within the Maarintalo building on the Aalto University campus, previously a healthcare centre and IT workshop it now sits empty and disused, setting a perfect canvas upon which students could imagine future scenarios. Groups were initially guided through visioning workshops in which they speculated upon the conditions within which spatial practitioners could be operating in the future. These ranged from circumstances in which sea levels had risen to flood large areas of Finland’s coastline (including Maarintalo itself) to the value and status of building materials having inflated dramatically as a result of the moratorium on new construction.
Within these contexts students also developed Spatial Practitioner roles inspired by Zosia Dzierżawska and Charlotte Mathere-Barthes’ graphic novel Architecture Without Extraction. Roles imagined by groups included Spatial Storyteller, Decay Architect, Building Bodyguard, Bio Curator and many more.
Alongside tuition, staff from each university conducted lectures and workshops which explored the themes of the summer school in relation to their own practice. These were distributed across the two weeks marking moments of inspiration and perspective amongst the daily activity of design and speculation. Central St. Martins tutors Daria Moatazed-Keivani and Joe Mercer conducted a workshop exploring seasonality in relation to the built environment, asking groups to first reflect on the way the dramatic annual changes to the environment of Helsinki would affect their proposals and how these could respond in a way that celebrates these natural cycles. Then groups were asked to project further, using anticipated changes to these cycles resulting from climate degradation to design resilience into their proposals to not only withstand these changes but work to stop them from becoming a reality.
Aalto University organised a series of excursions to projects, events and locations in and around the city. Some were directly related to the summer school brief; a church in Meri-Rastila on the outskirts of Helsinki was due for demolition but architecture practice Vokal (Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä) worked with the local community to not only save it from destruction but reimagine it as an arts and community space which now sees almost constant use. Others showcased the beauty and culture of Finland, one notable trip was to Nuuksio National Park. Local experts guided the visitors through primeval forest, describing local flora, fauna, funga and geology. This included learning about Finland’s natural assets through foraging and outdoor cooking, and cultural practices through enjoying lake swimming complete with a lakeside sauna.
The summer school culminated in an exhibition created and curated by the students. Each group selected a space within Maarintalo and produced an installation which exhibited the future they have projected into as well as the spatial practitioner roles present there. The exhibits were interactive, often encouraging visitors to assume these roles or participate in ceremonies that, like a funeral, explored the ending of an extractivist past but moved towards a more positive future of planetary care and wellbeing. While some groups imagined the building overtaken by nature, forming a balance between the human and beyond-human occupants, others investigated policy; writing realistic proposals for taxation on empty properties and establishing societal motivation for spatial reuse, or imagined the building as an archaeological fragment; the spatial practitioner speculating on the uses of sophisticated building elements like plug sockets in a future where such technology has long since faded. The plethora of ideas on display was overwhelming, the energy which the students brought to the task inspiring and the success of the execution was reflected in the high number of visitors to the exhibition. In two weeks each group reimagined a seemingly uninspiring building, embodying new perspectives to breathe life into the previously unused and inanimate Maarintalo, in doing so not only proving the inherent value it holds at present, but the offering it could be to a more hopeful future and asking questions of the built environment as a whole.