Care has, in its broadest sense, become a central theme in artistic and curatorial work in contemporary art in recent years. These practices often align with more socially sustainable ways of working or respond to crises produced by neoliberalism, such as the crisis of care. At the same time, they emphasize cooperation and social justice as alternatives to the era of poly-crisis and the looming eco-catastrophe. Care extends beyond human life to include other species and the surrounding ecosystems.
Vapaa Collective, a Helsinki-based architectural collective founded 2019 by architects Iines Karkulahti, Charlotte Nyholm and Meri Wiikinkoski. Vapaa Collective combines theoretical and design work with artistic practice to envision new forms of regenerative environments. Throughout 2024, they have explored a theme related to care, titled Architectural Acts of Care, approaching it with a series of architectural performances from various perspectives across three cities—Helsinki, London, and New York. These performances were produced in co-operation with the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland and The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with the Consulate General of Finland in New York.
What forms of care can architecture provide?
Joonas Pulkkinen: Let’s talk about first the architectures’ role in the present. Why architecture matters?
Meri Wiikinkoski: Architects create the largest and most permanent works among the art forms. Their work shapes our everyday environment, which means that architecture is not solely the concern of architects—it can and should be critiqued, like all common things. What makes the profession wonderful is that you feel the importance of influencing things with your own work.
JP: Vapaa Collective was born through joint coffee discussions, what were the starting points? Did you study at the same time?
MW: I studied with Iines at the same time, and Iines and Charlotte were colleagues in the same office at the time. During the time we started, there were all kinds of coffee table discussions among the profession, and everyone had big questions in mind regarding the environmental sustainability of the architecture. The discussions ended and then they always started from the beginning, which is why we founded the collective as a platform to take the discussion even further.
Charlotte Nyholm: We knew that the built environment produces 40% of greenhouse emissions, 30% of all waste and uses half of new materials. Also 30% of nature loss is caused by the built environment.
Iines Karkulahti: The general feeling was that the vastness of these issues was too big to tackle in a normal day job. In the environmental crisis, all of the issues are entangled with each other in multiple ways, which makes it hard to grasp and know how to start unraveling it within a traditional design project.
Charlotte Nyholm: Personally, the collective has freed up space for the rest of life as well. When talking about climate anxiety, actions are the best way to approach that anxiety. I don’t need to rant about the environmental crisis every time I meet Iines.
JP: When we discuss modernization in the context of urbanization which happened mainly after following decades after World War II in Finland. What kind of surprise has it come that the urban stock built in this way is not so sustainable in nature and lifespan?
IK: We would like to challenge that question a little. When talking about buildings becoming obsolete, one must be careful to distinguish whether the buildings fall underused because they are unusable, or because people don’t like them anymore.
CN: The unplanned old cities we’re not unproblematic either. Modernism was born from the fact that the old, closed city blocks were dirty, poorly ventilated and dark. The idea of a new world was born, where the sewers work and there is light and fresh air. I don’t think it was possible to predict durability in terms of civil engineering when reconstruction was being done at a fast pace in Finland. The pace was so fast, and we had to partly make do with what was available to meet the huge need for housing.
We treat the buildings of the 1960s and 1970s in the same way as we treated the Art Nouveau buildings during those buildings were designed. And now we long for Art Nouveau buildings again. As a collective, we’ve been reflecting on the importance of learning to tolerate and accept the diverse elements of our cities—both functionally and aesthetically. There’s a tendency, whether in food, fashion, or architecture, to discard the old entirely when a new trend arrives. This approach may work in other areas but is unsustainable in urban environments. The enormous amount of material embedded in buildings cannot simply be thrown away—it’s neither practical nor environmentally responsible. The challenge lies in learning to live with the aesthetic variety our cities offer. Another question is whether we can select materials that age gracefully—materials that develop patina or verdigris over time in a beautiful, meaningful way.
In the current global context, it’s crucial to find ways to coexist with the inherited realities of our built environment, especially given the environmental crisis we face. The situation we’re in is far from ideal, yet it demands that we think differently about how we inhabit and adapt to our surroundings.
MW: The shadow that modernism left is the admiration and valuing of clean, new, white and intact things. We also must remember that the lifespan of newer buildings has not been that much longer.
performance a krátký film, Tapiola, Espoo, 2024, photo: Pyry Kantonen.
IK: Architecture is not free from style and fashion, and we know that middle-ages buildings are always highly undervalued, independent of the era. Currently this critique is falling on the buildings from 60’s to 80’s, which is forming the majority of building stock in Finland. If all this stock were to be judged unusable, then we would be talking about a huge waste of material and resources.
To fight the undervaluing, one must identify what are the ideas behind the design and what the quality factors are. Many apartments from the 1960s have spacious variable room layouts and large windows. In many of these forest suburbs, the buildings are mainly considered “ugly”, and the real challenge is the dependence and dominance of cars in the public space.
JP: Are we at the core of how you have focused your attention on care and bringing also a performative aspect among your practice?
IK: When we started in 2019, we presented a statement as the closing remarks of the Climate and Sustainability Workshop for the new Finnish Architectural Policy Programme 2020. This statement later evolved into our manifesto. In that context, we reflected on a persistent phenomenon in architecture and construction. On the one hand, we are terribly aware of the extent and diversity of the problems we cause, but we are using wrong tools to think of the future. Utopian thinking starts from the scratch and tries to reinvent the world without context and connection to the current situation.
One should learn to accept and learn to live with the inherited present state and build the future from these starting points. From an architectural perspective, this necessitates a shift toward sustaining practices—not as a state of stagnation, but as an active, evolving process. These ideas also formed the starting points for the Architectural Acts of Care series. For us, engaging in tangible actions and immersing ourselves in the environment has been a way to stand at the edge of the atmosphere and observe the phenomena that emerge from it.
MW: Performativity, as part of this year’s main theme Architectural Acts of Care, has brought us closer to people through meaningful encounters. This level of connection isn’t something you can achieve simply by designing static objects and not being present.
JP: Architecture is a technical field by nature. In the context of care this also raises the question of its possible gender bias, do you feel that the field somehow involves a masculine, “technical rationality” way of looking at the world?
CN: Yes, absolutely. On a broader level, I think there’s a persistent assumption, both in Finland and globally, that technology will solve our environmental problems. That is a significant issue. While energy efficiency measures are a step in the right direction, there’s little evidence that technology alone provides lasting solutions. On the contrary, new technologies often bring new challenges—such as the environmental impact of the battery industry or similar concerns. Care offers an entirely different way of understanding what is valuable and meaningful. While art has long explored care as a theme, it has a unique ability to envision radical futures. Unlike industries bound by market forces, art leads the way in imagining alternative possibilities. Through artistic practice, we can introduce bold, transformative ideas that challenge conventional approaches course, art has been researched as a theme for a long time, but art is always at the forefront in conceiving images of the future, rather than sectors stuck in the market industry. Through art, we are also able to bring out quite radical acts of openings.
JP: What are the parts of the Acts of Care as a whole?
CN: The first part took place in Helsinki during the spring, the second in London over the summer, and the third in New York in October. Each part served as a treatise, addressing different scales of the connection between the climate crisis, the construction, and the role of care within it.
Starting on the largest scale, in New York, we explored the shifting coastline caused by rising sea levels while construction continued at its current pace. We marked a new shoreline with seawater, making it visible through a symbolic act of mopping. The mop, often associated with care and maintenance, represented a critical tool to prevent the escalation of this crisis. It emphasized that, without care-oriented interventions, we risk reaching a point of no return.
In London, at the Barbican, we worked at the edge of modern architectural heritage. Here, we questioned the shift from a linear approach to one that sustains and regenerates. A caregiver performed the act of washing circular patterns repeatedly in this environment, symbolizing the continuous and cyclical nature of maintenance. This gesture highlighted that maintenance is not just a process with a beginning and an end but an ongoing interaction requiring constant attention and care.
In Helsinki—or more precisely, in Tapiola, Espoo—we worked on a more personal scale at the Heikintori shopping center. Once the commercial heart of the garden city, Heikintori has since fallen into neglect. In a guerilla-style interventions, we undertook acts of care and restoration. Ownership of the property now rests with a distant real estate holding company, disconnected from the building’s immediate context and community. We pondered whether closer, more personal interaction with a building fosters a deeper understanding and connection to it. I believe this psychological experiment was effective. This approach challenges the traditional notion of architecture as simply the result of creation. Instead, it proposes that architecture emerges through the relationships formed when people interact with, maintain, and renovate buildings.
MW: In Helsinki, the audience consisted mainly of random passers-by, engaging with the work by chance. For the London performance, we intentionally chose a location that encouraged openness and interaction among people. This choice proved successful, as it sparked many meaningful discussions. In New York, we incorporated live monitoring as part of the implementation, allowing remote participants to follow the process in real-time. Each part of the series has been an independent exploration, resonating uniquely with its specific environment. We have now gathered the results and are working on an exhibition format to present the material.
JP: To what extent do architects need to leave their own handprint on urban space? How do the “aesthetics of the new” determine the designer’s work?
MW: If an architect designs a building, the interesting question is whether it will be demolished before the architect dies.
CN: When most people think of an architect, the first thing that comes to mind is the design guru, although in reality many architects work with the existing urban structure already, through planning or renovations for example. Only in the past few years, prestigious architectural awards have also started to be awarded to renovation projects, which speaks volumes about how it has been considered less valid.
MW: Although it is much more demanding in nature.
IK: We have discussed a lot about the need to redefine the value of design and what it could be used for. The way our society perceives creativity, poses all creative professions with a prerequisite of proving your creativity by creating something tangible. For architects, this means producing designs and preferably buildings. We’re partly facing an identity crisis, about what is one’s own value and the right to be a creative person. I have taught urban design at Aalto University from the year 2018. Nowadays, more students are more and more aware of what they have come for, but there are also still students who enter the field and say that “I was told that I could be an artist and create my own art pieces!”. Many feel that it is not at all what they expected. Many who have been in the field longer may feel the same way but express it in a different form. We urgently need to reframe creativity itself, so that we can understand better that the actual interesting design questions of our era lie within the existing structures and engaging in the processes that maintain – rather than build – our world.
MW: Also in Finland, there are many good examples of offices that have understood that the direction must be changed and acted accordingly. This is an interesting time to be an architect, because now we are defining the direction the profession is going. Now is the chance to make an impact in a way that matters.
JP: What other kind of care is needed that architecture cannot respond to? And how can architecture enable a framework for care and concern?
IK: In this year’s Acts of Care work series, we considered, for example, the following: “One thing that I would like to highlight at this point, though, is how invisible the carer is. Putting on these overalls was like an invisibility cloak: we were literally retiling the floor without any permission to do so but without anyone paying us any mind. The invisibility of care work is of course true far more broadly in society, whether we talk about labor in the home, caring for children and the elderly, or healthcare work. More often than not, this work falls on women and different minority groups. The way care so often goes unseen and unappreciated was one of the points we wanted to raise with the installation, but we were still a bit surprised by how literally it manifested on site.”
Architecture should move away from new works, and better recognize its potential as world-sustaining processes. But the big question is, of course, whether architecture as an individual field can move to caring practices and create a sufficient appreciation and thus a “sufficient price” for the care of buildings, unless the wider society learns to see care (like the care of people) as a productive activity, but only as an expense item.
