What has been ongoing at Hyrsylän Koulu

On the 7th February 2019, after 1,5 years of work and negotiation since I first sighted Hyrsylän Koulu in 2017, I finally signed the deal of buying this former school. Built in 1905 and closed down in 2015. Now, in March 2020, what's been happening?

The auction by the city of Lohja ended in September 2017 and the initial proposal and price from my side stood unchanged: 180k euros to buy the property and restore it to bring a mix of private apartments, cohousing, coworking and educational spaces.

For this pilot and innovative project to succeed, I gathered a team and created a company named “Gamified Cohousing Oy”, framed under the work being done at Architectural Democracy.

Hyrsylän Koulu is now the culmination of other trials of cohousing and coworking in Finland. The most recent attempt for this, from my side, was in Porvoo, with the Svartså Skola.

Svartså did not work out despite much work, drawings, a website and a team assembled for it. It failed due to a lack of transparency by the real estate agent negotiating the deal and the high price. But luckily Hyrsylän Koulu was found just in time.

The delay of the whole process to buy Hyrsylä's abandoned school in the municipality of Lohja was caused mainly due to a neighbor’s complaint to the authorities, the nationwide famous Aira Samulin. She was against the sales of this property to me and not to her. As it is usual in most countries around the world, whenever a building is facing changes it has to go through a set of legal steps to be accepted. One of these important steps is to ask the neighbors, if they are in any way against such changes, even if all the legalities are ok. So, with the complaint, we could not sign the acquisition of the school and it was agreed with the city of Lohja, to make a pre-contract, supervised by my lawyer, to state it clearly that my intentions were serious.

The decision of the Administrative Court of Finland arrived in mid-December 2018 and decided in my favor. I respect Aira's complaint and value the system that protects the community first. Newcomers like me, must work harder than locals, simply to prove they are to be trusted by the local community.

After the Christmas holidays, and despite a great deal of unexpected delays due mostly to people’s sickness, I paid and signed it on the 7th February 2019 at 10:30 at the city of Lohja. The mayor of the city of Lohja, Mika Sivula, also dropped a short visit during the signing wishing me a warm welcome to Lohja, but it was Tapio Ruutiainen from the city of Lohja, here shaking hands with me, that did most of the work in Lohja, showing a great balance betweeen professionalism and friendship throughout these years of negotiations.

It is easy to fall in love with this region and with this building. It was Perttu Iso-Markku, a former student of this school and a friend of mine from my political life, that gave the hint that his house was being sold. From that moment till today, one can feel it with the eyes of our skin (as Juhani Pallasmaa says) that this place has seen far more happy and inspiring moments than otherwise negative ones. On that day of 7th, Feb. 2019 the cold outside mattered not.

So, now it was time to apply our ideas into Hyrsylän Koulu. During those 1,5 years before the signing, we improved our company and we were granted several financial supports as for example from Business Finland or The Helsinki Think Company, to develop the company and the needed app/game for the platform/facility management, which will be used at Hyrsylän Koulu and other future gamified cohousings.

With the valuable support of the Games Factory of Helsinki, we selected the company Zaibatsu Interactive Oy, from Jyväskylä, and made together the first lines of programming and visualizations which we have been showing throughout the world in many presentations such as this one at tiedekulma in Helsinki.

This app is at its early stages, but we are improving it constantly, see here some of its study cases and visualizations:

Meanwhile, we have documented exhaustively the whole building with laser scans and photogrammetry. The building is now far better documented then it has ever been. Soon we will be able to show much better groundbreaking 3D interactive results which we are working with a team from Portugal.

We have been in close talks with the city of Lohja and the Museovirasto (the heritage protection association of Finland) to find the right balance between improvements, to meet both the modern standards of living and working, and to keep the building as authentic as it can be to the original. For example, the floor of the school will most likely be renovated back into its original wooden floor, removing the added surface installed in the 80s and we will add ramps to make the school wheelchair accessible. My father dedicated his life to the professional integration of mental handicaps, and when he consulted the city of Porto about ramps, he simply explained to them, ramps are great for people with a troley, elderly, baby wagons and... ah yes, wheelchairs.

We have too, been extremely careful in documenting the history of the building by collecting documents and interviewing former students and teachers as here Paula Ojansuu did so well with a 360 camera.