Architect Sampsa Palva sees sustainability as a choice

Architect Sampsa Palva is FCINY’s artist-in-residency in July 2018. He is a founding partner and CEO of the award winning architecture and interior design agency Studio Puisto Architects. During his time in New York City, Palva will study a recent phenomenon – the extended stay accommodation. 

While Studio Puisto’s designs are rooted in traditional and modern Finnish architecture, the team re-interprets this important history to fit a contemporary lifestyle. Studio Puisto’s design philosophy is based on three main goals: Collaboration, Sustainability, and the Creation of Experiences: 

"We want to engage our clients as collaborators to create innovative and effective design solutions. Sustainability is a choice based on company values. We approach it in a holistic way. It is a sum of many factors and involves everything from living habits and ecosystem to technical solutions. We want to create experiences that make people feel refreshed, empowered and joyful." 

Sampsa Palva points out that we are currently in a big transitional phase. Recent changes in urban lifestyle and living habits can cause people to feel stressed easily. Residents are therefore willing to spend increasingly more on services to ease their daily routines. Combined with rising square meter prices of apartments in every major city centre, tenants are willing to reduce the size of their apartment to have access to better shared spaces and services within the same building. Increased mobility has also caused the need for different kinds of accommodation and housing solutions that traditional housing can’t offer.

Enter the extended-stay accommodation, a type of housing between a hotel and apartment. Usually those settings incorporate amenities such as a gym, restaurant-kitchen, library/media spaces, and cleaning service. For Palva this is a very interesting new housing typology that has a lot of potential and possibly will have a major impact on the industry in the long run. In New York Palva is planning to study concrete examples of this new type of housing first hand:

"I am looking forward to a great deal of inspiration and a lot of new ideas for my work. I hope to explore and find new contacts in the hotel and housing industry. I'd like to meet developers, hotel owners, entrepreneurs and designers that would be interested in Scandinavian design / Nordic lifestyle and possibly would be interested in collaborating with us in the future."