Meri Rastila

Helsinki, Finland

Housing

13.000 m²

2018

Meri Rastila is a housing proposal developed for a coastal context where forest, sea, and city meet. The project begins with a shared urban problem: how to introduce density without creating monotony. Its response is a compact, rational framework that still allows variation in everyday living, combining repetition with difference, collective structure with individual outdoor space, and a clear architectural order with a rich relationship to landscape.

Above this base, housing rises through stepped terraces that open towards long views of the forest and the sea. The terraces extend domestic life outdoors and introduce gradual transitions between public exposure and private retreat. This section-based strategy gives the building its identity and breaks down its scale, allowing density to be perceived through a series of inhabited platforms rather than a single continuous mass.

The design is conceived as a vertical neighbourhood emerging from a continuous ground condition. At street level, public routes, shared spaces, and planted buffers are organised to connect existing urban fabric with future landscape, framing an active edge and a readable sequence of spaces from the city into nature. A central patio anchors this ground, supporting daylight, orientation, and a shared interior atmosphere while reinforcing a sense of community.

The proposal integrates multiple housing typologies within a cohesive system. Social galleries support circulation and shared encounter, while private terraces provide each dwelling with an external threshold. The project positions common space as a spatial connector, linking homes to each other and to the surrounding territory, and sustaining a form of collective living grounded in everyday use.

Environmental performance is embedded in the construction logic. A CLT structure is proposed to support flexibility, efficient assembly, and long-term adaptability. In this way, the project frames housing as an urban ecology, where landscape, communal life, and a legible architectural order operate together as a single development.