Life on a Leaf building
Artist Jan-Erik Andersson’s boundary-breaking total-art-work, the leaf-shaped detached house Life on a Leaf, was completed in Turku in August 2009, after a ten-year process. The unique house, which served as the Andersson family’s home until early 2023, was designed in collaboration with architect Erkki Pitkäranta. The duo work under the name Rosegarden Art & Architecture. The house was the production part of Andersson’s artistic doctoral thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts. He explores various themes related to the relationship between art and architecture, and between house and the environment. Can a house that is based on stories written by the artist and figurative forms such as a leaf, a cat’s bell or a Brazilian raft be called architecture? Why do we not see more houses in the shape of a flower, a hat or a shoe?
Author Robert Powell describes the house in Blueprint magazine (12/2009): “The form of the Leaf House is unique. By day it resembles a strange hat or misshapen boat; by night a Jack O’ Lantern, glowing from within, its windows evoke the abstracted eyes and mouth of a Finnish folklore giant. Though the structure appears quirky and follyesque – modernism goes Moomin – it is far from haphazard.”
Along with famous architects such as Kurt Schwitters, Le Corbusier, Antoni Gaudi, Bruce Goff, Konstantin Melnikov, Hundertwasser, Archigram, Will Alsop and Rem Koolhaas, Andersson cites Swedish children’s author Elsa Beskow, whose books include houses in the shape of hats, umbrellas and shoes, as one of his main sources of inspiration. One of the main themes that has interested Andersson throughout his 30-year career as an artist is the exploration and questioning of the boundary between the colourful and representational aesthetic that characterises the world produced for children and the understated seriousness that characterises adult visual culture.
Dr Judith Collins describes Andersson in Sculpture Today (Phaidon 2007): “His works are usually about love, longing and nostalgia. The intention is to create sculptures and installations that inspire children and adults to create their own fantasies and stories, …”
Life on a Leaf has inspired more than twenty of Andersson’s artist colleagues to create artworks for the building’s structures. The results include wall and ceiling details, wallpaper patterns, a laminated countertop, light fixtures, a video piece on the floor, and a sound piece in the ornamentation of the railing that responds to changes in wind and light outside. Outside the house, the artists have also designed not only the paving and benches, but also the shape of the landscape. Andersson describes the works as a way to experience friends as present. The works also symbolise the social dimension of the house. The house is not an enclosed private house, but a space where people with different aesthetic views and ideas can meet and work together, and this is reflected in the aesthetics of the house. Modernist elements such as white, six-metre-high walls coexist with heavily ornamented surfaces, kitchen cabinets bought from Ikea and mosaic work designed collaboratively by the family. All of the house’s toilets, baths and sinks are from recycling centres. The house is heated with geothermal heating.
Artist/critic Kimmo Sarje describes the interior design in Taide magazine (2/2010): “Inside, the contrasts are stronger than outside, as the space tensions between concrete brutalism and playful ornamentation. The undulating reinforced concrete wall that dominates the kitchen and living room – like 1950s Brazilian modernism – challenges the whole Moomin world.”
Andersson stresses that research on a sustainable future must be done on a broad front. In architecture, sustainable development must not lead to a minimalist approach that excludes all artistic elements and unnecessary ornamentation from buildings. Instead, we should consider the implications of comfort, imaginative neighbourhoods and caring personal freedom in the pursuit of a slower and local lifestyle. In the theoretical part of the thesis, Andersson refers to the role of detail, ornamentation and artistic elements in making a building “come out” and become architecture in its broadest sense. Andersson explores whether a new term, “iconic space”, should be introduced to describe the spatial experience that is created in a house when the floor plan, windows and ornamentation have representational forms.
Another important research topic is how the surrounding nature is gradually introduced into the house through cultural elements – for example, through the leaf-shaped floor plan of the house, which avoids straight angles, and through figurative elements such as leaf-, teardrop- and heart-shaped windows. Nature is also brought in through the curvature of the house’s interior walls, which simulate the feeling of walking on a nature trail. The house rises upwards in three distinct floors. This solution creates a distinct atmosphere for each floor, conveying to the experience the feeling of climbing towards the light at the top of the mountain.
These carefully considered approaches have also been the starting point for Dr Yrjö Haila’s article on the house project in Framework magazine (The Finnish Art Review) (10/2009): “Nothing less is at issue with the project Life on a Leaf than the creation of a new world. Houses not only provide space for inhabitants, they also create inhabitants.”
Since 1995, Rosegarden Art & Architecture has shown how a symbiotic collaboration between artist and architect can work. Andersson and Pitkäranta have paved the way for playful architecture in a boundary-breaking way, where art and ornamental elements, often based on stories written by the duo, work together to create architecture that stimulates the imagination. Rosegarden has fearlessly crossed many of the invisible boundaries imposed on architecture by rigid modernism and classicism.
Critic Jonni Roos describes the duo’s work in Arkkitehti magazine (The Finnish Journal of Architecture) (3/2010): “The house designed by Andersson and Pitkäranta is actually an exploration of an alternative design process. They have tried to show that architecture can be created by telling stories, painting pictures and playing”.
In 1997, Rosegarden was awarded the Spot of Light of the Year for Kuminia, an eco-barn in the shape of a cumin seed, designed with the cows in mind. Designed for 50 cows, the barn, where the cows can move freely – even in winter – is made entirely of recycled materials.
”Nature appears everywhere in this environment: from inside or out, you see its large windows in the likeness of a leaf, a heart, lips, and a teardrop. Ornament, playful and nostalgic, floods the interior: weeds and flowers are cast in the concrete walls, a mosaic ship sails in the bathroom, chefs cook up a storm in the kitchen laminates, and lions blanket the upholstery of the sofa. But poems, video, and installation art are also included here in imaginative ways, expanding the boundaries of what the interior design, or content, of a house can encompass.”
Total Design – Architecture and Interiors of Iconic Modern Houses (Rizzoli, 2014) by professor George H. Marcus.
Gerbera (1998), the flower-shaped school building of the Kiipula Garden School, is an architectural total-art-work based on the story of the genetic laboratory of alchemist Erikus Kipulensis. The house is full of artistic details, and its conservatory houses Finland’s first public sound artwork by sound artist and Chicago Art Institute professor Shawn Decker.
Rosegarden has created a number of full-scale artworks for interiors, including numerous school buildings, offices and churches, such as the full-scale artworks for Masala (2000) and Karakallio (2001) churches. For the parish hall in Kouvola (2004), the duo received the South Savo Art Council’s Architecture Prize.
Architect and photographer Matti A. Kallio says in the architecture publication Projekti-uutiset (2/2010): “Rosegarden Art & Architecture’s works are about life, love and childhood, about releasing emotions in the spirit of nostalgia.”