Presenter - Saara Pyykkö

Saara Pyykkö, Color Researcher, Designer and Educator
Afternoon Breakout Session

The Color Design Methods of New Neighborhood – The Koivusaari Case in Finland

My proposal for COLOR IMPACT addresses the color design methods of the new Koivusaari neighborhood in Helsinki, situated on an island in the Archipelago of the Baltic Sea. The size of the island is now 17 hectares, but after landfill the area will be 34.7 hectares. In 2035, the island will be a home of 5000 inhabitants and a working place for 4000 people. The purpose of the color design has been to create a new identity of the neighborhood and to connect it carefully in the landscape with colors. In Finland, the design guidelines complement the low-based detailed plan and they describe more the main ideas about the residential area and its architecture. The results of this color designing process have been a new type of design guidelines for architects called the Block Cards. During this practice-led doctoral research project, I have first worked as a color designer of the detailed plan and the design guidelines, on the Koivusaari-Lehtisaari Team, Detailed Planning, Land Uses and City Structure, Urban Environment, City of Helsinki, and next I have analyzed the research data as a researcher. The color designing itself has been my method to produce new information about the environmental color design, color design methods and the meaning of colour in urban planning. There is little research about the color design methods in urban planning context. In my research, I have compared my color design methods with Smedals’s color design project in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway and Lancaster’s color design methods in England. The size of the new residential area, the landscape, the coastline and the Nordic weather and the seasons at 60N make Koivusaari a special case to design and research. In the Koivusaari case, I found eight separate steps in the color design process and used over twenty type of color design or color analysis methods. The paper will be based on my article “Creating a chromatic atmosphere: The colour design process of the new Koivusaari neighbourhood in Helsinki” that is published in the Journal of the International Colour Association 2019.

Bio

Saara Pyykkö is a colour researcher, colour designer and educator and president of Suomen väriyhdistys, the Finnish Colour Association. She studied at Aalto University, graduating with Master's degrees in art education and landscape architecture. Her on-going doctoral research addresses the question of the architectural colour design process of new neighbourhoods, focusing on the detailed plan and the design guidelines of a new residential areas.