Travel and Service Centre

Client: The City of Tampere, the Finnish Transport Agency, the VR-Group and Senate Properties
Place: Tampere, Finland
Competition: 2014
Area: 100 000m2
Cost: 340M €

AZPML Team: Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno, 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


A LANDSCAPE OF CONTAINERS
The idea of a collection of vertical containers is very much the inspiration of 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 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 very much part of the references for our proposal.

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 epicenter 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 floorplate, they have been designed with an antimetric, tapering mitering on every corner, which generates an effect of instability and lightness. The resulting effect is an illusion of tilting that defies the gravitational stasis and makes the project resonate with the dynamic expression of the Tammerkoski Rapids.