Academic portfolio

Introduction

Pekka Pakkanen started as a teacher in the Architecture Department of the Helsinki University of Technology in early 2000 running the “Working Drawings and Building Specifications” course for the Department of Building Technology for three years.

Having renewed the course to answer contemporary needs he started running material-based courses in the same department. From 2005 to 2011 he was in charge of running steel, wood and concrete based studios under the supervision of Professor Antti-Matti Siikala. These courses would give the student a material to study and utilize to its fullest. The tasks of the courses varied widely from building a pavilion of wood and glass for the first Helsinki Design Week on the site of the Ateneum Art Museum to a concrete park in Otaniemi and  large scaled steel structures in Jätkäsaari, Koivusaari and Kalasatama. The Kalasatama steel office complex competition was a national architectural student competition course. The course was organised by all architectural schools in Finland. A team from Aalto university won the competition. The same happened the following year in the Länsiväylän portti competition.

Alongside the material-based courses, Pakkanen has taught the Basics of Building Technology. This course tackles the archetypal Finnish construction: the sauna. In this course, the students first come up with their concepts of saunas for a given site and then solve the issues of having the conceptual idea carried out to functional and aesthetic detailing.  

Pakkanen taught the Basics of Landscape Architecture course at Aalto University for three years. Professor Jyrki Sinkkilä carries out an interesting and open-minded approach to teaching. He challenges students to push the borders of both the perception of architectural concepts and thinking in general. His courses would start with a cross-section of inputs from literature to free arts and lead to an organic path of studies of spatial, atmospherical and material issues. These years have been very influencial to the way in which  Pakkanen sees teaching architecture. In these courses, the main focus was in the process and personal learning paths which always led to something more than the usual.

From 2011 to 2018 Pakkanen mostly focused on running an ever growing architectural practice: Huttunen-Lipasti-Pakkanen Architects. During these years, he gave visiting lectures and visiting critiques including diploma works both for the Architectural Department and the Department of Design at Aalto University.

After leaving his practice in 2018, Pakkanen was asked to teach a special course in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Aalto University. The course tackled the events of the year 1918 in Finland. The students were not given a precise program but a deep dive into the events of the Finnish Civil war by lectures of historians, photographers, sociologists and writers. This course was looking for a way to remember events that are actively being forgotten and to make them visible in an appropriate and influential way. The touching and challenging task lead to some amazing and multi-disciplined works that will hopefully be exhibited this summer in Helsinki.

Academic excellence

Evaluation by Professor Jyrki Sinkkilä, director of the Landscape Architecture program at Aalto University 26.3.2019:

“Pekka Tapio Pakkanen (born 17th November 1969) taught multiple courses of Landscape Architecture and Building Technology in the Department of Architecture Technology between 2005 and 2019.

Pekka Pakkanen is a skillful, motivational and committed teacher who can adapt to a wide variety of teaching situations, students’ needs and learning processes. His input has played a considerable role in his courses’ success. He has continously received praising feedback from both students and fellow teachers. I can warmly recommend him for University level teaching tasks, and I am glad to give further information”

Preferences and recommendations can be asked from the following people:

Juhani Pallasmaa, Dean of Architecture, Professor at the Helsinki Technical University during the time of the Pakkanen´s studies

Markku Komonen,  Professor of Public Buildings at the Helsinki Technical University during the time of the Pakkanen´s studies

Jyrki Tasa, Professor of Contemporary Architecture at the Technical University of Oulu during 1993-2002 when Pakkanen worked for Nurmela-Raimoranta-Tasa Architects and gave a visiting lecture in the University of Oulu

Trevor Harris, Professor of Townplanning at the Aalto University during the time Pakkanen worked for Harris-Kjisik Architects

Peter Zumthor, Professor of Architecture in Mendrisio during the time Pakkanen worked for Atelier Peter Zumthor

Antti-Matti Siikala, Professor of Building Technology at the Aalto University during 2003-2011 when Pakkanen was running materialbased studios in the Architectural department.

The works of Huttunen-Lipasti-Pakkanen have been published in hundreds of architectural magazines and dozens of architectural books around the world. The projects have been exhibited in the Biennal Architectural Exhibition organized by the Finnish Museum of Architecture and in multiple international Architectural exhibitions.  

In his 2019 established office, Planetary Architectural Research Studio, Pakkanen and his partners are gathering data in topics related to sustainable architecture:  industrial prefabricated timber construction methods, renewable energy integrations with architecture, human behavior in built environment and closed circles food production within built environments. This research is based on building methodology for evaluating both the quality of built environments and their sustainability. The ultimate task of the company is to tackle climate change from an architectural point of view. The means for this are specific studies ordered by various clients, public lecturing, product and system development and architectural design.

Activities addressed to the public and professional activities, acknowledgements and other important information

Pakkanen is a regular speaker in the National Timber Architecture days (Puupäivät), Concrete Architecture days (Betonipäivät) and Steel Architecture days (Teräsrakennepäivät). He has spoken of “Love and Architecture” and “What an architect can do to save the world” on international and national Pecha Kucha nights. He has organized a series of industrial timber architecture related speeches in co-operation with Ministry of the Environment in 2019 and is organizing a series of speeches on the use of renewable energy in co-operation with the Helsinki Energy Department at the moment.

In 2013, a national commercial TV company MTV, started  a series called “Most beautiful home in Finland”. The concept of the series was to show a wide selection of homes to open the understanding of the whole spectrum of ways to organize one’s living. Pekka Pakkanen was one of the three hosts alongside an interior architect and a journalist. His contribution was to gather a wide variety of homes designed by architects for the program and use the medium to educate the wider audience about the basics of architecture and its importance. The series was a huge success with 600000-800000 viewers per episode. This project offered a comprehensive public speaking training in front of cameras in live-like situations.

In 2018, Pekka and his wife Tuija Pakkanen took part in the Xprize Visioneering challenge. Xprize is a California based foundation started by the world known future scientist Peter Diamandis. The foundation organizes the greatest innovation competitions in the world. The first Xprize aimed for commercializing space travel. The 10 000 000 US dollar prize for the first person to build a vessel that visits space twice in 48 hours was awarded by Richard Branson.

Pekka and Tuija Pakkanen´s entry in their category “Feeding the Next Billion” was developed in co-operation with leading food and future scientists in Finland and the U.S., tech specialists from Silicon Valley and Californian multimillionaire funders. The aim was to build rules for the science community for a competition to produce closed circuit food production techniques. These techniques answer to the nutritional needs of the vastly growing population of the planet and limit the use of water and phosphorus. The competition rules aimed not only to feed people but aso to find ways of bringing modern agriculture to the cities and supporting the formation of village-sized habitats.

Their entry “Soilless Agriculture” won the whole competition category after 6 months of development and multiple elimination stages. The final science competition following the Team Pakkanen´s rules is to be launched once the Xprize foundation has gathered the prize money.

In 2018, Pakkanen built a concept for “Architecture in 2050″ TV series. He applied for a funding for the project and contacted producing companies to film a series about the architecture of the future. The idea was to base the storyline, on the one hand, on the technological breakthroughs that are about to happen and, on the other hand, on the grand challenges of climate change, urbanization and continuing growth of the number of people especially in Asia and Africa. The concept was to show the near future of our civilization from the point of view of several themes using architecture as the visualizer. Architecture has a special role in the crossroads of the values of society and the technological means to solve complex challenges. The concept for the TV series was further developed in co-operation with a production company and is still waiting to find its final funding.

Pakkanen has been a member of the Finnish Architects Union communication board since 2019. The board was established to make the role and the importance of architects more visible in the society. The means for doing this work on levels of talking to politicians, taking part in societal discussions and organizing events to uplift and underline the meaningful role of the architects as the solvers of complicated issues with holistic approaches.   

Annexes

Diploma from the Helsinki Technical University x 2  (in finnish & english)

Work certificate / Nurmela-Raimoranta-Tasa Architects

Work certificate / “Working Drawings and Building Specifications” / Jan Söderlund (in german)

Work certificate / Peter Zumthor

Work certificate / Teaching in the Aalto University 2010-19 (the archives have lost the data before 2010)