© AALTOSIILO
The AALTOSIILO rethinks materiality for the 21st century and the role industrial heritage plays in memory, in shaping place and cultural identity.
Our world is at a crossroads. Not only are people at risk, but our cultural heritage is under threat from lack of resources, natural disasters, climate change, terrorism, mass tourism and war. There has never been a more critical time to use technology for preservation. In the 21st century we have the technological means to do so much: we urgently need to act now to record and preserve our cultural and environmental heritage for future generations. The creation of a centre of technology applied to creative preservation in Oulu is a thoughtful and provocative call to action. Aalto’s Silo, a space once used for storing wood chips, will become a store for knowledge – a place focused on sharing human skills, transferring technology and gathering diverse types of information and activity. The Research Centre set up by Factum Foundation in Hassan Fathy’s mudbrick building at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings (now the Theban Necropolis Preservation Initiative headquarters), focusses on recording the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the four years since its launch, it has become an example of capacity building in Egypt. It has trained a local team and now employs seven people, stimulating both local knowledge, skills and the cultural economy.
The proposed AaltoSilo in Oulu will focus on digital recording, processing and output technologies in the north of Finland. Specific projects, funded from both public and private sources, will focus on diverse forms of digital recording, processing and visualisation. Architectural and environmental preservation will sit alongside digital recording and creative ways to record our changing environment.
"Being unused for decades, the Silo provides possibilities, unique challenges and great potentials in reuse as well as in architectural and structural innovations. Rehabilitation of the landmark building will hail a new period, not only in the neighbouring Toppila area but also in the City of Oulu. The Alvar Aalto Foundation looks forward to the rise of the Phoenix!”
Alvar Aalto Foundation
The Silo photographed during the first visit to the site in October 2020 © Charlotte Skene Catling
In August 2020, Factum Foundation and award-winning architectural practice, Skene Catling de la Peña purchased Alvar Aalto’s iconic wood chip Silo. This experimental concrete ‘cathedral’ in Toppila has been sitting empty and derelict since the cellulose works were closed in the mid-1980s. Despite several attempts over many years of trying to fund and use the Silo, the Oulu City Council decided to sell in the hope that someone would emerge to save the building. There was concern that it would be demolished like Aalto’s later silo at the Sunila Pulp Mill, currently being considered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The AALTOSIILO partners feel that this is too important to lose and are working towards transforming the Silo into a research centre promoting architectural preservation and re-use. A point of focus for digitising and communicating the importance of the industrial architecture of the north and – in turn - the impact industry has had on the environment.
The main challenges are twofold and concern finding solutions that can satisfy both the structure and Aalto’s vision behind it, in accordance to the SR-1 category of protection on the Silo. The new Silo aims at becoming a centre for the preservation of industrial heritage - an area of work that until fifty years ago wasn’t even considered in restoration.
Read the project outline: AaltoSiilo - Design for Transformation